Saturday, August 13, 2011

How to Write a School Research Paper (or a Master's Thesis)

Many students, grammar school to graduate school, dread writing large papers. However, if you know how to break down the task it becomes almost automatic.
I asked history teacher and former colleague and department chair, Mike Vice, about his remarkable system of writing papers. Mr. Vice explains his fail-safe strategy below. I have lightly edited his remarks. See also my short blog on bringing back research papers (here).





Sources
Sources may include the internet, books, magazines, encyclopedias, newspapers, personal interviews or other appropriate items. Your paper may not rely principally on Wikipedia. Better Wikipedia articles are sourced but may rely on unreliable opinion or research. Personal interviews must be identified in your bibliography, listing the person interviewed and the date.

Format of the paper
The paper must be typewritten or written on a computer word processor. New Times-Roman font and 12-point size are considered standard.

The paper should consist of several distinct parts: an introduction, a thesis or "burning question," a body, and a conclusion. The introduction, thesis, and conclusion are usually about a paragraph long, but may be longer as required.

The following explanations and examples may be helpful. For consistency, the examples will all deal with the same topic: "Was dropping the atomic bomb on Japan a good decision?"

The opening usually consists of one or two sentences that set the scene. Example: "In August, 1945, the Allies were in position to win the war in the Pacific. They were preparing to end it by one or more of three methods: invasion, bombing the Japanese into submission, or dropping the atomic bomb."

The purpose of the next part, the thesis, is to tell the reader why you're writing the paper. What question did you ask yourself? This part is very important for, if you lose the reader here--if the reader isn't interested by your question--you've lost him or her forever. The thesis is also usually one or two sentences, but may be longer if the question being researched is complex.

In our case, a sentence or two should be enough: "The choice made was to drop the atomic bomb on two cities. This was not the proper choice, for the bomb was such a horrible weapon that it should never have been used on people. Other alternatives for ending the war were available and would eventually have proved successful, even though they would have taken longer." Or, taking the opposite view, "Dropping the bomb was the proper choice for, by doing so, the loss of life at the end of the war was kept to a minimum." The thesis may also be put into the form of a question, such as "The question to be studied is, 'Was the solution chosen--to drop the bomb--the correct one?'" (And then you answer your own question.)

The next part of the paper is the most important. At this point you develop your arguments. Why do you answer your burning question as you do? This is also the longest part.

Using all of the research information that you have gathered to support your argument, you organize it in such a way as to convince the reader that you have decided the issue correctly. I suggest that you not only examine the reasons why you decided in favor of dropping the bomb (or not), but also why the opposite view is not the correct one. That is, if you favored dropping the bomb, why were the other alternatives not the correct ones? You might say that an invasion would have cost a larger number of casualties (and why), that conventional bombing alone could not have won the war (because the Japanese people's morale probably could not have been broken, and cite examples where this type of bombing had failed to win wars in the past), that a "demonstration" explosion (as some suggested) would only have given away the secret (and it might not have worked), that the Russians were going to "help" us against Japan but we didn't trust them so weren't about to drag out a final surrender, for fear that they would take over too much territory or impose conditions on us as a price for sharing the victory, etc., etc.

A good paper will include at least three good reasons why you decided as you did, and perhaps two or three reasons why others' arguments against your thesis are wrong.

Having pulled together all of the evidence and (hopefully) convinced your reader that your thesis is correct and proved, you end with perhaps one paragraph that sums up your argument: "Based on the various arguments, dropping the bomb was the proper decision. While other alternatives were available, they all would have failed to force a surrender for the reasons noted above. Had they been tried first and failed, President Truman would have had no choice but to drop the bomb anyway in order to end the war. Thus he would have had the worst of all worlds--the terrible casualties of the invasion, the participation of the Russians, AND the horror of the bomb."

As you can see, the format may be summed up in a simple manner:
1. "Say what you're going to say (or prove)": Introduction and thesis,
2. "Say it": The body of the paper that describes how you decided as you did, and
3. "Say you said it": The conclusion that wraps it all up.

Using 3" x 5" note cards

This is a paper-writing technique I was taught way back in my own high school days. You know, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth? It is the most helpful technique about paper-writing that I ever learned, and I continued to use it throughout my scholastic career, especially when I wrote my Master's Thesis.

Note cards consist of two types: bibliography cards and data cards. Both are necessary in order to organize your paper properly.

Bibliography cards
You prepare one of these for each and every source that you use in your paper. The technique is this: as you do your research you have blank cards at the ready and every time you find a source that even might be useful you fill out a 3" x 5" card with all of the bibliographical data that will be required when you prepare the paper's bibliography: author(s) name(s), title, publication data. Since publication data for books and magazines or computer sources are different you must be thorough here; more data taken down is better than less. Be careful. You don't want to be writing your paper and realize that you've left off an important piece of information and have to make another trip to the library!

When all of your cards are completed and you're about to write the paper, review them and make sure that there are no cards in the deck for sources that you've decided not to use. If you find any, discard them. Citing a source in the bibliography that has not actually been used in your paper ("padding the bibliography") is a cardinal sin.

At the end of writing the paper, when you're preparing to write your bibliography, take the card deck and alphabetize it. Then, as you word process the bibliography you need only make an entry using the information on the top card, then flip to the second and write up its entry, and so forth.

It's really easy!

Note cards
These are also used for your research and for writing the actual paper. Some people have scoffed at me for using this "low-tech" method, but nothing is more frustrating when you're organizing your paper as you sit near the computer, than shuffling through odd and ends of pieces of paper, trying to make sense of the facts and quotations you've gathered in your research. Another colleague noted that she merely recorded all of her data on the computer itself, then returned to the file(s) to put her paper together. But how, I asked her, do you then organize your thoughts as you look at the various parts and pieces? So, use this technique, old-fashioned as it may seem. As you breeze through the actual writing of your paper, you'll be glad that everything you need is at hand and that you can (literally) write a five-page paper in about two hours if you truly know your subject and you're on top of things.

So, the note cards... As you are doing your research, keep a stack of these cards at your side. As you come to any piece of information that might appear to be useful, take a card and write it down, being careful also to note the source and page number (if a book) or any other information that might be necessary for a footnote in your paper.

When you're ready to start writing you'll have a stack of cards in front of you. (For my master's thesis I had a few hundred, though you'll probably have less than fifty for most major papers.) Take each card and examine it, thinking about where it belongs in the paper; what is its theme or "chapter"? Then sort the cards into piles by topic or issue. Resort them into the most logical way of organizing your thought as you imagine making your arguments in the paper. When finished, you will actually have the outline of your paper in front of you!

When you finally sit at your keyboard, you first write your introduction and thesis then, just like with your bibliography cards, you take the first card and its data or quotation or whatever, incorporate it into your paper, write some more, take the second, and so on. Using this organization technique you can write a lengthy paper in a short period of time. Once I had organized the note cards and annotated and sorted them, I wrote my Master's Thesis, a paper of approximately 100 pages, in about three days!




Bibliography
When putting together your actual bibliography, do not number the entries and you must alphabetize the entries by author’s last name. For entries with no author, put them at the bottom of the listing, alphabetized by title of article or entry.

Examples of bibliographical entries

From a Book (Author, Title, Publication Data):

Prange, Gordon. At Dawn We Slept. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985.

For a book with multiple authors (first author is last name first, others as “normal”):

Craddock, Martin, and James Durridge. Dickens and the Coalminers. London:
Infinity Press, 1993.

(Note that the second line of an entry is indented three spaces.)

For a book with multiple authors, edited by one of them, or as the major contributor:

Johnson, Alfred, ed. Essays on American History. New York: Dunham, 1996.

Johnson, Alfred, et al. Essays on American History. New York: Dunham, 1996.

From a Magazine (Author (if known), Title of Article, Name of Magazine, Vol:No, Date):

“Hemingway’s Tragedy.” Newsweek. Vol. 22:46 (December 19, 1984).

From an Encyclopedia (Author (if known), Title of Entry, Name of Encyclopedia, Edition):

Smith, James. “The Maya Indians.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1994 edition.

From Encarta or another encyclopedia CD:

(Same as for a regular encyclopedia, but use Encarta for the name.)

From the Internet (Author (if known), Title of Entry, Internet Address):

Jones, Michael. “The Demise of Roundball.” Http//:www.basketball.com.

You may wish to buy a copy of Kate Turabian's term paper book. You won't need it for short high school term papers, but it will be a godsend when writing a scholarly paper in college, one with footnotes and a "professional" bibliography. It's available in long and short forms on Amazon.



4 comments:

  1. Good advice, but I've never heard of a thesis being a "question."
    -Sam

    ReplyDelete
  2. I hope your paper answers the question--maybe we can call it a sub-thesis.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have not checked in here for quite some time since I thought it had been getting uninteresting, but the last small number of articles are really high quality so I reckon I will add you back to my daily bloglist. You deserve it my friend

    ReplyDelete
  4. Which blogs did you like, and which ones did you find boring?

    ReplyDelete

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