Just the FAQs: An Alternative to Teaching the Research Paper

Abstract

placed a photo of a player scoring a goal into his draft about rugby, making the text wrap around the photo the way it does in magazine articles. I admired the technique, and he asked if he had to credit the photo in a footnote or something. Liz, sitting next to him, asked if he'd show her how to put a photo into her paper about Siberian tigers. While I was trying to find the correct format for citing photographs, I asked Brian what his thesis about rugby was going to be. You remember, I said. is your point? What is your paper going to prove? Rugby is the greatest sport ever, he answered. I'm going to prove Siberian tigers are really cool, Liz chimed in. While I tried to refresh their memories about the proper subject for a research paper and the importance of having a thesis, they both objected, saying, look at all the research we've done. Maybe I had gotten off track by focusing on authentic research, letting students' interests and questions drive the research. We were doing so well, using search engines to find Web sites and browse material, getting full-text documents online from periodicals, searching library holdings with sophisticated text-recognition tools, finding answers to what they wanted to learn. And, I had to admit, Brian and Liz had discovered some interesting information that I certainly never knew about rugby and tigers. But it didn't fit my notion of the traditional research paper, and I had to wonder what I was trying to teach them in the first place. Every year it seems to get harder to teach this type of writing.

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