Participants in WRDS 150 work on one research project for the whole semester. The research is carried out in stages, so that students can practice their research skills while learning about scholarly discourse. We spend a lot of time on discourse studies in class, so I will focus more on the writing process in this blog.
One of the first major challenges students face is choosing a topic to write about. Topics should be both interesting and specific. Interesting to who? To you, of course. A research topic is interesting when it excites you, and when you want to learn more about it. Good topics are ones that make you want to uncover, expose, argue, discover, investigate, and share. Buyer beware: good research will challenge you to think differently than you already do, to understand different points of view, and to ask new questions. Good research requires you to learn something and then share not only what you have learned, but how you learned it. You may not change your mind, but your explanations will be stronger as a result of your work.
In this course, we choose both a topic and a research perspective. A research perspective is a way of organizing a topic area to cultivate a certain kind of scholarly discourse. Research perspectives will have questions that they can and cannot ask of a topic. While we study the discourse features of scholarly articles in class, practice asking questions from each research perspective we study. Ask these questions in class and we will start some very interesting conversations! These conversations will help you identify your research topic.