English 102

Preparing to Write the Debate Paper

Home
English 102
Syllabus (DOC file)

Davis Oldham
FOSS 5355
206-546-4768

Please carefully read the complete instructions for the Debate paper. Also review Developing a Research Question, Reviewing Your Question and Sources, and the UW’s Research 101 tutorial on Topics (especially pages 3, 4 and 5).

Review your list of sources. Pick five to seven that are most relevant to your research question.

For each source, decide how it relates to your research question:

• direct (i.e., directly answers the question, whether it agrees or disagrees with the answer you expect to give in your paper)
• indirect but substantive (i.e., it doesn’t answer the question but provides information or analysis that is essential to answering it, such as defining key terms, explaining how a process works that is central to your topic, and so on)
• general/background (i.e., provides general information or context that will help reader understand the issue, but is not essential to answering the research question)

Tip: The best papers are often ones that have few if any “direct” sources. This may seem backwards if you’re not used to doing research, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The purpose of research is to make a new contribution—answer some question or solve some problem that no one else has solved yet. If you have a bunch of sources that already answer the question, and you’re just repeating what they say, you’re not making that new contribution. On the other hand, if your sources all contribute some insight to the question, but you have to synthesize those contributions into some new and original idea, that’s a sign that you are doing something right. So don’t be alarmed if you don’t have a lot of sources that fall into the first category (“directly answers the question”).

Of course, not all papers work like this. Some papers try to answer a question that lots of people have tried to answer already, but their answer is different or they offer a new angle or a new piece of information that no one else has thought of. I’m just saying don’t assume that all or most of your sources have to be direct.

On the other hand, if most of your sources are “general/background,” that is a sign you probably need to find some new ones that are either direct or indirect but substantive.

Here is a slightly different set of questions about your sources to help you determine if and how they will be useful to you. As you can see, three of the five answers I’ve listed here (and there are others) describe sources that are indirect but substantive. For each source’s thesis, state whether it:

• answers your research question (if so, does it agree or disagree with the answer you expect to give (your projected thesis)?)
• defines a key term in the research question,
• provides information directly relevant or necessary to answer the research question,
• suggests a different way of looking at the topic,
• provides general/background information,
• or…?

Then, try to think of two possible alternatives or revisions to your research question to make it fit better with your sources. If necessary, revise your research question to give it more focus. (See Reviewing Your Question and Sources.)