Imagining Your Project

1.1 How Researchers Think about Their Projects

1.1.1 Topic: "I am working on the topic of ..." 1.1.2 Question: "... because I want to find out how or why ..." 1.1.3 Significance / So What: "... so that I can help others understand how or why ..."

1.2 Conversing with Your Readers

1.3 How Researchers Think about Their Answers/Arguments

1.3.1 Think of Your Readers as Allies, Not Opponents 1.3.2 Think of Your Argument as Answers to Readers' Questions 1.3.3 Use the Parts of Argument to Guide Your Research

1.4 How You Can Best Think about Your Project

All successful researchers do at least three things: they raise questions readers want answered, search out answers to those questions, and argue for those answers in their papers, presentations, or reports. In this chapter, we show you how to get started by finding or inventing a research question that will be interesting enough for readers to care about and challenging enough that you have to research its answer. Then we show you how to plan your project by mapping out the parts of the argument you will need to support that answer.

1.1 How Researchers Think about Their Projects

All researchers set out to discover things they don't already know: facts about the world that we'll call data. But they undertake their projects for different reasons. Some just want to satisfy their curiosity: baseball fans memorize statistics about their favorite players and teams; foodies investigate the ingredients that go into a fine meal; space buffs read everything they can about NASA's space program. These sorts of people do research just for the fun of it. They don't have to care whether others are interested. They can research in whatever way they want without bothering to write up what they find.

Most researchers, however, pursue their projects not just for themselves but also for others, their readers or audience. They do their research to share it — because their colleagues or clients need it, because they think their question and its answer are important to other researchers, or just because they want others to know something interesting. But when researchers share their results, they have to offer more than just whatever data they happen to dig up on their topic. They seek out certain kinds of data — those they can use to show that they have found a sound, reliable answer to a research question, such as Why did the Apollo moon landing become a symbol of America's identity? In other words, they look for data that they can use to build an argument — that is, data they can use as evidence to support a claim that answers a question.

The best researchers do more than just try to convince others that their answer is right. They also show why that answer is worth knowing by showing why their question was worth asking in the first place. For example, in a business setting, researchers usually show why their research helps someone decide what to do:

If we can understand why our customers are moving to the competition, we can know what we have to change to keep them.

But in an academic setting, researchers usually show how the answer to their research question helps others understand some bigger, more important issue in a new way:

Historians have long debated about how nations construct their individual identities. If we can figure out how the Apollo moon landing contributed to America's national identity in the 1960s, we can better understand how symbolic events shape national identity in general.

If you cannot imagine yourself appealing to an audience of historians, you can still imagine one closer to home: your class. Locate that larger issue in the context of what you are studying:

A major issue in this class has been how interest in space exploration has waned since the end of the Apollo mission. If we can figure out why getting to the moon was so important in the 1960s, we can better understand how such events shape national identity.

You can find out whether your question is worthwhile by describing your project in a sentence like this one:

1. Topic: I am working on stories about the Apollo mission to the moon,

2. Question: because I want to find out why it was deemed so important in the 1960s,

3. Significance: so that I can help my classmates understand the role of symbolic events in shaping national identity.

In its second and third parts, this sentence takes you beyond a mere topic to state a question and its importance to readers.

When you state why your research question is important to your readers, you turn it into a research problem. A research problem is simply a question whose answer is needed by specific readers — your audience — because without it they will suffer a cost. That cost is what transforms a question that is merely interesting to you into one that you can expect others to care about.

TQS: How to Identify a Worthwhile Research Question

You can help yourself think about your project by describing it in a three-step sentence that states your Topic + Question + Significance (or TQS):

TOPIC: I am working on the topic of __________,

QUESTION: because I want to find out __________,

SIGNIFICANCE: so that I can help others understand __________.

Don't worry if you cannot at first state your question's significance. As you do your research and develop your answer, you'll find ways to explain why your question is worth asking.

Note: Like all of the formulas you will find in this book, the TQS formula is intended only to guide your thinking. Use it to test and refine your question, but don't plan to use it in in your paper in exactly this form. In your introduction you will use the information from each part of this TQS sentence but not the sentence itself (see chapter 13).

That three-step TQS sentence is worth a closer look because your project's success will depend on your ability to discover or invent a good...