Blog #5
Chapter 5 in the Bedford Book of Genres was both and reassuring. The process it described in order to write a research paper made the paper seem a lot less daunting. For me, the best advice of the chapter was about having a general topic and then exploring ideas through preliminary research. It eliminates the need to have an extremely specific research question in the very beginning, which makes the process of researching less stressful and allows for more in-depth research. If you’re just searching for some specific topic, you might miss out on some other information that could really help and strengthen your research paper.
Not knowing all that much about what you’re writing about at first makes trying to come up with a specific research question to answer difficult. Preliminary research makes it easier to come up with a detailed question because it provides some information so you can make an informed decision on what you want to write about. It leads to finding out some basic facts and also reveals some opinions and arguments that are related to the subject. Along with that, it lets you discover what about your topic you’re most curious about. Genuine curiosity makes it less likely that you’ll lose interest in what you’re researching.
Overall, the thing that stuck out the most to me in chapter 5 was how beneficial preliminary research is to a research paper.