Research Paper Topics

For most students, the most difficult part of a research paper is simply finding the topic. In a fit of panic, almost everyone falls into one of the common mistakes.

• To explore strange new worlds. Certainly, it's interesting to read about topics that are new to you, but if you go too far from your field of expertise, you won't even know what questions to ask. You'll write a breathless paper that explores very ordinary basic definitions.


• To seek out new life and new civilizations. A research paper must be grounded. If you get into speculation ("Do space aliens exist? Did they leave crystal skulls to teach us technology and art?"), you aren't writing academic research. Leave that sort of thing for the supermarket tabloid papers.


• To boldly go where no man has gone before. If there's nothing written about your topic, no primary research, you'll have to fly to the Amazon yourself to come up with a decent paper. Maybe it's really intriguing to ask the enormous questions, but save that for your doctoral dissertation. Right now, you've got really limited time and no foundation grant.

Three more paradoxes

• Big topics make small papers. Students often figure that the more generalized and enormous topic will make a long paper more easily, but it's the tightly focused topics that suggest a LOT of further research. Consider which would make a longer paper (because it suggests more fertile research questions). "High gasoline prices" or "Effect of high gasoline prices on family-owned businesses in two ocean resorts: Ocean City, Maryland, compared with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware."


• Easy topics make difficult papers. (Difficult to find enough material, that is.) Students often go for no-brainers like "how to change a tire" or "reasons to quit smoking." The problem is that a three-page pamphlet has thoroughly covered the topic, so there's nothing to do except summarize it and get frustrated. There's nothing to prove, nothing to discuss.


• If you know it in your heart, you will have trouble proving it. When you approach a "research" project to teach the rest of us that you were right in the first place, you'll only look at sources that support your point of view. That's why nobody is in love with faith-based papers (except the writer and those who already agree). That's also why topics such as creationism, acupuncture, and macrobiotic diets usually don't fly in the academic world. You have to already believe the main point to accept the basic premise of the paper. There's no possibility for the "research" to change the writer's opinion, even the smallest amount.

My boyfriend the expert

I'm looking over the current crop of Ashland definitional argument papers, and I'm surprised at how many of them use interviews as research sources. I'm also surprised at the qualifications of some of the people interviewed. Sometimes it really worked. One student, answering the question "Are cheerleaders athletes?" interviewed the faculty member who is in charge of the cheerleading squad. This faculty member happens to be part of the Physical Education Department, and could speak (with some authority) about the number of injuries suffered nationwide by cheerleaders. Another, writing on the question "Are NASCAR drivers athletes?" interviewed her boyfriend. His qualification is that he watches a lot of car races on TV and even attended a couple of races in real life. Yet another, writing on the question "Are band members athletes?" (we seem to be on a roll here) interviewed several band members and learned that they really like being in the band and feel like they have to work hard.

Did these strategies work? Or, more specifically, would anyone call these real research? Or are they just fulfilling the requirement to find outside sources?

Let's review.

• Both the author and the audience must respect the source. The cheerleader source seems to work that way. She's got expertise (and academic qualifications) in the specific field the paper was discussing. Do I respect the boyfriend who put down his beer long enough to say, "Yeah, they look like they're working hard"? Nope. Would I respect the opinion of a Ph.D. in English who watches a lot of NASCAR? No more than I'd respect the opinion of a truck driver or anyone else—the degree only counts in the area it relates to.


• The source must have something to say. The band people only got to say that they enjoy band and work hard. They didn't get to talk about much of anything else. Nobody among the band interviewees was asked to compare the band experience to (for example) being on a swim team or being a football player.


• You have to ask the right question. The greatest interview source in the world won't help you much if you don't ask the right question and edit the response. The NASCAR boyfriend was allowed to ramble for about half the paper. The band members were asked if they liked being in band. The cheerleading advisor was asked how cheerleaders' injuries and workouts compare with those of other athletes.

What a research paper is about

This is the bottom line: it's about learning something new and reliable, not about simply filling space and accumulating things to put on a "Works Cited" page.

By the way #1: It's all in the question you're trying to answer. If the research paper question was "What do beer-drinking NASCAR fans think about the drivers?" the boyfriend would have been an expert. He just wasn't an expert on what sort of workout and exertion the drivers actually go through.
By the way #2: There's a way to actually cite these interviews. Look it up.

Sample Annotated Bibliography

When I began to work on this assignment, I first thought of doing an easy topic. I read the daily news and saw a lot of material about George Bush leaning on the EPA to weaken ozone standards. That looked promising, but all the sources seemed to rely on the same Associated Press story, and I was faced with either doing a very superficial survey of news articles or doing an incredibly technical thing on ozone (about which I know nothing). I could do the standard student stuff about abortion or alcoholism or gay marriage, but I don't think I could face it—those three topics will probably cover sixty percent of my papers this year, and it's impossible to come up with anything very new.

Then I remembered one of the hottest issues in the teaching of English: Ebonics. It seemed perfect. For one thing, it's not exactly a settled issue. For another, it matters because Black English is the natural language to a significant number of my students. It also matters because I have pretty much stopped reading about this important issue during the last five years, and it's about time to start again.

Defining a few terms:

In the Annotated Bibliography itself, I'm assuming that the reader is aware of some basic definitions, so I have to help you become that reader. Here goes:

• AAE: African American English (sometimes referred to as AAVE—African American Vernacular English). This is the technical name for distinctively nonstandard Black United States English, emphasizing the independence of the latter from standard English.


• Ebonics: A term that comes from combining "ebony" and "phonics." It's a popular word for AAE. (Both of these definitions come from the Wikipedia definition of Ebonics.)


• Language versus Dialect (versus slang or sloppy talking). This is close to the heart of the whole discussion.
  
  
  • If AAE is just carelessness by people who know better, it should be easy to eliminate—it would be like the current habit of forgetting the "not" in the phrase "he could not care less." (Everyone knows that means he does the least possible caring, and the "not" gets dropped by people who aren't thinking about what they are saying or are trying to be cute.)
  
  
  • If AAE is just slang, the speakers are really modifying standard English, and it's still a pretty easy matter to deal with.
  
  
  • If AAE is a dialect of standard English, it's still pretty close, and most of the differences will be in the lexicon (words used and their definitions).
  
  
  • If AAE is a separate language, we can expect different word order, different verb structure, and so forth. The change-over from one language to another isn't easy, and frequently a person who is making the change (from French to English, for example) will take years and years before becoming as fluent as a native speaker.

After all that introduction (which would perhaps appear in a paper introduction, but not in the annotated bibliography), here's the annotated bibliography itself.

Notes:

1. This assignment took me about two hours. I spent some time messing about on the Internet, just long enough to find the Oakland Resolution, then had to leave and do some other work. Then this morning, I returned and did the whole thing in about 90 minutes. Of course, I was working in a field that I know something about. If I had been a total stranger here (a bad idea, by the way, for a research paper), I would have needed more time in general articles to find out just what is going on.


2. When I did this as an MLA bibliography, I lifted all the formatting straight from Son of Citation Machine. It's not that difficult.


3. Converting this to APA was a bit more difficult, so I ended up referring to the latest version of Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker. It's still not too difficult. The APA part took perhaps half an hour.


4. I can't close this without a quick tribute to Akron professor of linguistics Arthur Palacas, who has published several foundational articles on the topic and opened my eyes to it when I was in graduate school.