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The Writer's Choices

The goal of research writing is seldom to state the "final" answer to a question. Instead, the writer provides an answer, with supporting evidence. Each research writing product is part of a continuum that embraces past and future work on the subject. The best way to begin is to consider the point at which you are entering that continuum. Is the larger context of your project that of a student coming to the material by request from an expert in the field who will grade the product? Or is your approach that of a worker expected to produce a report on an assigned topic by supervisors who need to evaluate or initiate a new project? Are you a researcher whose audience is limited to the members of your profession, or a translator of technical knowledge for a general audience? Clarifying the context for your work ensures an appropriate fit between your goals and the reader's expectations. For example, applying decision-making models to a particular problem might make a satisfying Scope The goal of research writing is seldom to state the "final" answer to a question. Instead, the writer provides an answer, with supporting evidence. Each research writing product is part of a continuum that embraces past and future work on the subject. The best way to begin is to consider the point at which you are entering that continuum. Is the larger context of your project that of a student coming to the material by request from an expert in the field who will grade the product? Or is your approach that of a worker expected to produce a report on an assigned topic by supervisors who need to evaluate or initiate a new project? Are you a researcher whose audience is limited to the members of your profession, or a translator of technical knowledge for a general audience? Clarifying the context for your work ensures an appropriate fit between your goals and the reader's expectations. For example, applying decision-making models to a particular problem might make a satisfying undergraduate paper, but without a critique of the models themselves, it would fall short of the expectations for a graduate paper. A professional article might go a step further and test the critique against other cases. The scope of the first paper is to demonstrate learning; the scope of the second is to demonstrate analytical skill; the scope of the third is to create new knowledge through analytical skill. Each format has requirements of its own, and it is often not possible to do a good job in one format by meeting the expectations of another. It might seem reasonable to transform your undergraduate paper into an article for a general audience, for example, but the intrinsic requirement that students demonstrate "coverage" of material will not make the transformation to a general audience an easy one. Begin a research writing project, then, with a realistic appreciation of your reader's expectations, and of how much you can accomplish given your experience and your present knowledge of the subject. A high school student writing a research paper about William Lloyd Garrison might be able to convey a general description of the man, of other abolitionists, and perhaps of the power of the press by reading histories or biographies. A college student developing research skills might place Garrison in his historical context. A graduate student, after a thorough review of previous research, might consider a small point that has not yet been discussed thoroughly. A historian, on a personal timetable, might explore the undercurrents or themes in American history that, in his or her view, are reflected in Garrison's life and work. An article for a general reader might see Garrison in the light of subsequent history, drawing comparisons with the present time. We don't expect a high school student to see the range of possibilities inherent in a topic, or a college student to move easily from specific to general, or a graduate student to cover an important topic fully, partly because we have been so busy with forms, conventions, and prohibitions that we have neglected the reason and method of authentic research. But with so much material available from laboratories, journals, books, and computerassisted searches, it's easy to feel swamped, to have so much material that you don't know where to begin, or where you fit in. Some realistic view of the scope of your project is essential preparation for writing. Scale Once you have a sense of the kind of project you are engaged in, you want to know how much ground you can reasonably expect to cover. How will you illuminate the specific issue you choose within the context of all the available material? How can you make the most of your time and energy immediately, as you begin to read through your sources or analyze your data? Mathematicians estimate an answer before doing a calculation. Research writers need to do some of the same sort of estimating in order to settle on the scale of their project. An experienced writer senses patterns and relationships in any material that would be valuable in a potential project. This research wisdom results from knowing your own capabilities, and experiencing what research projects can and cannot accomplish. Working through a series of projects enables anyone to develop these instincts. But all research writing benefits from thinking through the scale of your work before you begin, so that you can select material from the start either for its intrinsic interest, or for its direct relation to your project. Imagine, for example, that you are near the end of a course in Soviet Foreign Policy and it is time to pick a topic for the term paper. You've been interested in decision-making in the Soviet Union, and although there has not been a great deal of information about it during the course, wherever it has come up you have gone beyond the assigned chapter or article to find more. You feel there is probably a strong political bias submerged in the conflicting scholarship on the subject. There is a definite split between those scholars who apply models for decisionmaking in the United States to the Soviet Union, and those who hold that there may be significant differences. There is another conflict, as well, between those scholars who see decision-making as immutable, linked inextricably with the past, and those who see the potential for change. You know you have something to say about all of this, but you're not sure what. The professor in the course is very skeptical of change in the Soviet Union, and you are aware of her hard-line approach. But you also know that she is interested in what her students have to say, and you feel pretty secure in approaching the project with the goal of finding out something for yourself and then articulating it clearly for the reader, without worrying about whether she agrees. The point is to do a comprehensive, careful job of gathering and sifting material in support of an active idea, one that is interesting in the way it explains actions, events, or apparent conflicts and contradictions: an idea that looks to the past and present and has something to say about the future. But as exciting and worthwhile as this would be, you realize you are a student pressed for time, with only so much background in the subject and experience in research. You wish you could take a month off and do only this project. After all, the paper might turn out to be the most important thing you do as a student. But then you come back down to earth. The scope of the topic is intimidating. You are far from being an expert, and the experts disagree violently. Your paper is due in three weeks. You don't see how you can possibly say it all in twenty pages, so you'll need to ask the professor if she's serious about the page length and the deadline. But more than that, you really want to do a good job for yourself and for the course, which has been inspiring. You realize you have to scale down your expectations. This paper will not be the ultimate answer, the resolution of all the conflicting evidence on the subject. You won't be able to do as complete a job as you wish, and even in what you do you will have to make room for demonstrating in some way that you have understood the course method. You're not going to be able to read everything that has been written on the subject to get a thorough background. You may not get much beyond the standard works and a few current articles or books. You'll need to be efficient as you gather material, discarding work that simply reiterates what others have written instead of adding anything new. (You've learned from previous research that there are both seminal writers and imitators or elaborators.) You're only going to have time for the main ideas, the best evidence. You may want to read your professor's book as well, but you're not sure it will be relevant to your specific topic. Scaling down, then, you need to choose a specific instance, a representative example of your topic, decision-making in Russia, for which there is some reliable evidence that adequately reflects the larger questions and conflicts. If your specific example is good enough, then what you say in a few pages can stand for a lot more: you will represent a good deal of thinking and reading by focusing everything you know on the details of the specific case. In the past, when you have been clear and thoroughly prepared, your writing has been charged with active information, encompassing specifics but imbued with a general perspective. You are going to do something small, but make it reverberate with larger overtones. That's the best you can do in your present relationship to the material. (Later on, for a thesis, or a research report as an intern in Washington, you might do a deeper, wider study.) An issue that has captured your attention is the peculiarly amiable agreement of the Soviet Union to set up two agencies--one in Russia, one in the United States--to monitor nuclear emergencies. You read about it in the newspapers, and you know there is some sort of disagreement among the experts about how and why the Soviets have been so willing to agree. You wonder how that decision was made; and you wonder, too, if you have enough background to offer some reasonable comments on the subject. Couldn't you show what you've learned about Soviet foreign policy and come up with some fresh ideas by focusing on this issue? You know there's no final answer on the question: it's a matter of current debate; within that context, you may have the room and the right to put forth your own idea. It seems a good way to start. If you do write this paper, what do you think you might discover--that the monitoring agreement is a trick, a propaganda device? Or that it represents something new in the way the Russians look at the issue or make decisions? You've read that the pressure for the decision came from a group in the Soviet Union known for generating propaganda, yet Gorbachev seems to have made the decision to go ahead suddenly, as if on his own. Could this be possible? And if so, what might it mean for other issues? Is the United States prepared to take into account changes in the Soviet Union, or are we too committed to our present views? Musing, you become enthusiastic again: suppose it is a change? Suppose we need to understand it and respond to it in a fresh way? This paper might actually help. . . . Exploring the scope and scale of a paper delivers you to your research with energy and interest. Clear about what you are looking for, yet open to discovery, you are fired with a desire to enlighten the reader. If you begin your research writing this way, you can judge immediately whether your readings, data, and evidence hold potential for your project. Everything you do from the start will count. You won't be caught in the middle changing your mind about the kind of project you're doing, or what you can reasonably expect to accomplish, and then having to go back over all the material you've already considered. There are countless ways in which research writing is sheer drudgery. You can thrash around in the material without confidence or patience, attracting the sharks of research anxiety. But to enjoy research writing for what it can teach you, and for what you can teach your reader, carefully think through the scale of the project to get a realistic sense of what you can include, and what you will have to leave out to finish the job on time. Style Even careful preparation cannot resolve the problems in organization and consistency created by fragments of previous attempts at a subject, or data gathered at different times for different reasons. In addition to scope and scale, you should give early consideration to style as a function of meaning. What organizing principle locks the pieces of your argument together? What gives the whole paper consistency and balance, from introduction to conclusion? Scope and scale may undergo refinement throughout a project, but style is so thoroughly embedded in structure that the writer must make choices at the start to avoid frustration later on. Organization Imagine you are an architecture student who becomes fascinated with the fragments of the past that are evident in the buildings in your neighborhood in London. Each day, on your walk to school, you study those remnants of earlier design that were once functional but, in the mid-nineteenth century, became ornamental. Through the winter of your first semester in London, you explore other neighborhoods to see if this pattern of structural memory applies. By early spring, you are convinced that there is a fascinating article to be written, not only for students and practitioners, but for a wider audience: people who would be interested in seeing more of the world around them. Here is a chance to explain what structures reveal about social change and values, through a familiar example. And the example is perfect: reflecting the need to move country life to the city, even if in image only, as the wretched, closed-in quality of city life, with its loss of privacy and sunlight, came to be accepted as a compromise with the need to find work. You begin your article one night sitting at your new word processor. Before sunup, you have fifteen pages about the economic and social influences on design. You take the draft off to school, but a few weeks later your professor still hasn't returned it, and exams have begun. You shelve the project. In Design Seminar the next semester, the assignment is to choose a structure at least a hundred years old, and describe it as a person of that time would have seen it. Perfect! You know exactly what to say; in fact, somewhere on one of your floppy discs you have the beginning of this paper already. The assignment is supposed to be three pages long, but you have enough to fill an article. When you retrieve it, you're surprised at how abstract the writing is, how turgid the prose. You'll need to rewrite, adding a practical section about the surface of a building, simply describing the details of the ornamentation. It's a silly requirement, but that will take only a page. A few photographs would be better. The real issues are the shift in population, the transfer of wealth, the change in the manufacture of goods, all of which can clearly be seen in the attempt to make row houses look like miniature castles. But through draft after draft--certainly not in three pages, and probably not in fifty--you cannot bring the two chunks of material together; you cannot reconcile the abstract and the concrete. They are pieces of two different arguments, one of which interests you, and one of which is a requirement; and they simply do not fit together. They don't even belong together. You approve of one question, and would like to dwell on it; you reject the other question, and don't want to waste your time on it. Months go by and neither the fascinating article nor the required paper gets written, until finally the director of second-year studies gives an ultimatum, a final deadline. She's not interested as much in the political and social influences on design as she is in the reason why you can't produce your work on time. Under pressure to get the paper in, you would have been better off if you had read and thought about the subject first, without writing that enthusiastic fragment. It is often easier to start fresh than to try to mesh different pieces of writing from different times. But there they are, fifteen pages representing real interest and excitement. Facing the deadline, your only recourse is to use the early material as an invisible foundation for a less exciting paper. It's possible; it does not need to be deflating, or disappointing. But it requires a decision about style as it relates to coherence and unity, and as it facilitates process and product, under pressure. Consistency Sometimes, as you read through a paper or an article, you are struck by a quotation, an example, or an assertion that seems entirely out of context, or of a texture different from everything that has come before. You notice it in compilations, of course: those articles and books put together out of lectures or essays from different times. But it is also evident in self-contained projects. Such inconsistencies, representing a disjuncture in the process of assembling a piece of writing, diminish the force of any argument. Let us say, for example, that you are having a hard time finishing a journal article on welfare. Your thesis is that welfare must be separated from politics because the real needs of human beings cannot be met by programs that fail to take those needs seriously. It's not a popular idea to propose in a time when people have turned away from social or community goals. But you have done your homework. You've studied various programs that have worked, and you've found a recurrent theme: the ones that do the most good are run by the wisdom of the people themselves, not by bureaucrats whose careers depend on cutting costs instead of helping the hungry, the abandoned, the battered people in misery and despair. You have also gathered evidence about another cause of failure, those programs run by well-intentioned, highly educated people who do believe in help, but who see themselves as the indispensable arbiters of what is best. Even with willing administrators programs have blocked or diverted the very help that people need. This is your subject, your issue. Part of your responsibility is to try to educate people. In your article, you want to focus on two community-run programs that the bureaucrats expected to battle over scarce resources, but that agreed, instead, to share the money equally. Part of the difficulty with the article is that your perspective, rooted in thirty years of experience, reaches past the immediate issues toward the larger questions of hierarchy and inequality. These certainly are not issues you can cover in a thirty-page article that would convince any but a few like-minded readers. Had you known from the start that you would end up with such vast issues on your mind, you might have done your research in a different way, or you might not have agreed to write the article in the first place. But you weren't thinking about scope or scale; you had an idea, a good example, and an urgent desire to communicate it immediately. Now you know, as you come to write the conclusion of your draft, that your experiences and examples have led inexorably to a general question: how to empower the powerless. You should really start all over, but the article is due in a week. For relief, you browse through a classic text on institutions by one of your favorite writers. Now, as if for the first time, you understand some of the things he says, and see how they relate to your article. In an hour of browsing you find at least ten good quotes, exactly what you need to illustrate what you want most to say. You choose one and draw a conclusion from it. The language of the quotation is so graceful, the thought so powerful that you want more. You quote him again; and then you realize the best way to end your whole article is with a really good quote from his last chapter. Your article will be the stronger for it, more powerful than you imagined when you started, leading the reader to the larger issues. But it's really three-quarters of a paper, with a broken ending, and interesting quotes tacked on. The reader who has followed your argument may see the relevance of the quotes but wonder where you've gone, what you had to say in conclusion. The reader who had trouble following will be left in the dark by the introduction of quotations from a book which is apparently about a much more general subject. Changes in the texture or established style of an argument are often difficult for the writer to see, especially in a draft written under pressure. Feedback helps. What's at issue is a balance between the specific and the general, between experience and learning, and between your own thoughts and feelings and those of others. Balance Consider the example of a nursing student's report of an OB-GYN rotation that suddenly stops to give a textbook description of the birthing process, and then ends on a dramatic personal statement about the beauty of motherhood. For a reader, such shifts in balance need to be accounted for in the writing itself. Otherwise, no matter how powerful the writing, they raise questions about how well or thoroughly the writer has thought through the project. Organization and consistency determine balance as an element of personal style. Each writer strikes this balance in his or her own unique way. Research writing, whether meticulous in its objectivity or passionate in its advocacy, carries a message through its style about the intensity and thoroughness of the writer's approach. There are clear, persuasive monographs in biochemistry; there are interesting, active technical manuals; there are papers, theses, and articles on every conceivable subject that have made a difference to their readers. A balanced style in research writing is crucial because it clearly conveys a message about the quality of thought. It is important to sort through these issues before you begin, and to resolve them as you proceed.

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