CORE II RESEARCH AND WRITING WORKSHOP

Research goals:
1. Compiling a list of reliable and relevant research materials (books, articles, essays, chapters, journalism, online media)
2. Out of this mass of materials, determining which are most useful to your research project

Research strategies:
1. Determine research topics. Pick two or three topics that you expect to cover in your paper, and finesse those topics into a few words (in various combinations, with useful restrictions [“”, +, - ( )]) that you will use in the many search engines to start collecting research materials. You should be crafting and adapting and reshaping these search phrases based on your initial results. Eventually, these topics will form the core of your paper.
2. Search forward. Especially through the library tools that allows you find books, you may come upon a reliable, useful, relevant book written ten or more years ago. But what’s been done lately? Use this older book as your new search term, and plug it into Google Scholar, Google Books, and Web of Science to see what works have cited this book more recently (and don’t forget to restrict the years of your search).
3. Search backward. Let’s say you found a recent article or book which is useful, but not quite exactly on topic (or, you want to find more sources on the same subject). The first thing you do is read through that book or article’s bibliography (or, if there is no bibliography, read through its footnotes/endnotes). If you do this with several recent pieces of research, you’ll see several works cited over and over, and you can even subject those works to a “forward search” (see #2).
4. Useful, but not relevant. Sometimes you’ll stumble upon a piece of scholarship which is tangential to your actual research, but still useful. Let’s say you are researching tourism to Mount Doom. You might find an article about tourism to the Shire which isn’t exactly on point still has some useful information (on the tourism industry in Middle Earth, for instance). Feel free to get what you can and then set it aside: your job is not only to find sources, but find relevant sources.
5. Start online. It is wonderful to browse the physical library for journals, books, magazines (while doing your laundry!), but it is often not the best place to start. First of all, we don’t have a lot of hard copies left in our library, as so many things are digitized. Second, even if we have something, it may not be on the shelves. So you need to start your search online: through the library catalogs (Blais and Worldcat), through Google searches (Scholar and Books), and through databases (by subject and material).

Research tools:
The Google Family provides many ways to tap into popular and academic resources. Don’t forget to keep limiting and reconfiguring your search topics (through limiters such as +, ( ), -, “”; or click on the advanced search link on any Google search).
Google Scholar (scholar.google.com): will capture articles, essays, citations, and books. You can limit (through the advanced search) by subject area and date.
Google Books (books.google.com): will search entire texts of books, but will not always show you the text of those results. Often useful to arrange results by date (in lefthand side of screen).
Google News (news.google.com): An initial search will only return recent hits, but then you have the option to click on “archive” on the lefthand side of the screen, and results will come back dating from more than a century ago.
Google Blogs (blogsearch.google.com): not the best blog search engine, but good for recent hits.
 “Google Everything”: click on “everything,” and you’ll capture social media, images, twitter, etc.
Popular culture tools: Especially useful if you are researching movies or fiction and want to gauge popular response.
a. Internet Movie Database (imdb.com): Some useful tools include Fun Facts (trivia and “goofs”); user responses; and date on budgets, receipts, posters, trailers, etc.
b. Amazon.com (amazon.com): Some useful tools include Customers also bought…, as well as Editorial Reviews and Reader Reviews (which you can search for particular phrases)
c. TripAdvisor (tripadvisor.com): Full of user-generated content about various sites from the perspective of the general traveler

Library resources (libraries.claremont.edu)
Start search online through the Blais (blais.claremont.edu); note that, in the area of Religious Studies, many of your hits may be at the Claremont School of Theology (on Foothill and Dartmouth). You can get a borrower’s card from them for free as a Scripps student; you can also use books/reference materials in that library. Or, you can request these resources through Link Plus or Interlibrary Loan.

You should also search Worldcat, available through the Databases page (see below). If you find a resource on Worldcat that you like that we don’t have you can click request, and be taken to the Interlibrary Loan page (aka Illiad). After setting up a user name and password linked to your library ID, you can request books, articles, chapters, essays, through Illiad.

While on the Databases page (libraries.claremont.edu/resources/databases/), you should check these very useful databases:
a. ATLA (religious studies): Some results will come back with a PDF link; if not, you can always click on the little green GET THIS ITEM  button, and you will be taken to a page that tells you if Honnold subscribes to this digital journal; if not, you can click directly on the Interlibrary Loan link, be taken to Illiad (see above), and request the item
b. JSTOR (academic journals): Captures almost all academic journals, but often with a moving “wall” of four or five years past (i.e., you will not get the most recent items.)
c. Book Review Digest: Just like it says! search by title or author
d. Lexis-Nexis (newspapers, magazine, government documents): A tremendous range of materials, so you’ll have to work on limiting your search (to, for instance, “English news sources” from particular dates). Most useful if you want to find journalistic sources beyond simply reviews.
e. Web of Science (cross-citation index): Be sure to limit your search to “Arts & Humanities.” You can search by topic or author on the main page for general results, or click on “Cited Reference Search” and plug in the name of an author (Last Name First Initial Asterisk, e.g., Jacobs A*) and be shown all sources by that author cited by other authors
other useful databases:
f. Academic Search Premier (journal articles)

CORE II RESEARCH AND WRITING WORKSHOP

Writing Goals:
Clarity and specificity: Know what you are trying to say and say it as clearly as possible

Writing Strategies:
Clarity refers to everything from individual sentences (“Does this sentence say what I mean it to say?”) to paragraphs (“Does every sentence in this paragraph make sense together?”) to the entire paper (“Is it clearly organized? Does it make sense that I am moving from this topic to that one?”).

Strategies for maintaining clarity include: outlining (and re-outlining as you move through drafts of the paper); reading your paper aloud (to yourself or a trusted friend); having it read aloud to you (by a very trusted friend).

Clarity also often means simplicity: shorter, clearer sentences; shorter, more obvious words (English is a language crazy with synonyms). Attempts to sound overly formal often result in overly convoluted sentences that actually make less sense. Avoiding the first person leads students to use even more awkward forms of expression: passive voice (which leads to loss of specificity) or the pronoun “one” (which too often is merely an awkward substitute for “I”).

By the same token, clarity also results from using appropriate forms of language: overly colloquial expression can sometimes result in loss of clarity. Keep in mind that one goal of these writing assignments is to develop your own clear, effective written voice.

Specificity can also refer to individual parts of the paper or the whole thing. In individual sentences, being specific may be as simple as watching your pronouns and not using this, that, these, and those as subjects of sentences.

A broader strategy for maintaining specificity and focus throughout your paper is to ask yourself: “Can I summarize what my paper is about in a single sentence?” If you can’t, you may not have focused your topic enough.

If you can, then you should write that single sentence down somewhere and refer to it throughout your writing process: does this sentence, paragraph, section of your paper relate to that single sentence? If not, your focus may have drifted. Or it may be that you’re not writing the paper you thought you were writing.

Specificity becomes very difficult when you are writing a research paper. Remember: You will have a lot more information that you will want to use in your paper. You’ll know all kinds of facts and details that simply will not be relevant to your main point. You will find yourself including these facts and details because you know them and you think they are interesting. But specificity means keeping your focus.

On the other hand, you will also know so much information that you will find yourself simply saying things without demonstrating them. Be specific in your references to ideas, themes, contexts: when possible, cite a source; when relevant, quote that source. Imagine that your audience is the other members of the class: what do they already know? What do you need to tell them?

Here is where your research and writing need to form a kind of dialogue, and where preparation comes in handy. You need to have your research organized and accessible: what can you say about (for instance) modes of transportation to such-and-such place? What are your sources? Do they contribute to your overall point? Do you need them all? Is transportation the best example of whatever point your trying to make? Perhaps transportation fits better in the previous section?

One additional piece of advice to help you navigate between your research and writing is: Write first, research later. Obviously, this doesn’t mean you should write all of your paper, and then fill in research. But it does mean that you can’t wait until all of your research is “done” before you start writing: there will always be more research. As soon as you have even a vague idea of what you want to say about your topic, start getting some thoughts down on paper: it may be an introduction (although see below); it may be a specific subtopic (“Hotels near Mount Doom”), it may be a string of ideas that aren’t quite formed into paragraphs yet. As you start writing, you’ll also begin to see what research you need to do (“If I’m writing about hotels near Mount Doom, I should also look into hostels”).

Finally: the only way to achieve effective writing (clear, specific) is through editing. Your first draft will not be sufficient. Editing does not mean merely changing words here and there: You need to be ready for drastic editing. (Here is where re-outlining can be helpful.) Very often, the weakest part of a paper is the introduction: we throw everything but the kitchen sink in there, we’re not sure yet of our focus, we just want to get something down on paper. We gain confidence as we go through the paper, achieve more clarity and specificity. But that vague, unclear, nonspecific mess of an introduction still hovers. You should be willing to completely throw it out and rewrite it. Keep in mind: No word, sentence, or section of your paper is final until you turn it in.