How is it significant for a specific audience? How might your question spur additional questions for a specific audience?

5.1 Refining the Research Question

Adapted from Lourdes Fernandez, Reflection: the research question
According to Comer, effective research questions:
Originate from a disciplinary context (take into account prior disciplinary knowledge)
Maintain significance (to a subset of people)
Keep a pointed scope (they are manageable and part of a larger question)
Spur further research (they have multiple branches of inquiry leading to and from them)
Describe how your most current research question fulfills each of the characteristics described above.
How does your research question fit within a specific discourse community?
How is it significant for a specific audience? How might your question spur additional questions for a specific audience?
What other avenues of research are currently unexplored but might be viable research questions for your area of inquiry?
How might different key terms, a different focus (on a specific demographic, on a subset of the problem, on a different audience) might shift the current research question?
Provide specific examples of how your research question meets/does not meet the characteristics above.
Respond to one other student.

0 0 0 0
5.2 Citations
Based on the reading on citations, please answer the following questions:
What is the citation style most commonly used in your field? How do you know?
What does it value (based on the order of items that are listed in the citation)? Why might a citation style emphasize author name and date of publication while a different citation style might emphasize use of footnotes or endnotes?
What resources are you using to make sure that your in-text citations are accurate? That your references/works cited page entries are accurate and consistent?
Please post the complete citation from one of your sources here. Include the citation style you used and the resources you used to decide how to organize the citation.

Week 5 Journal: Deciding on a Research Topic
Create Journal Entry
Journal Choosing a research topic can be both a liberating opportunity and a daunting challenge.
Many writers and researchers find that being allowed to select their own topic of research
inspires them to examine a deeper, more complex topic, or that it allows them to research
a personal interest. However, some find the prospect of narrowing down a research topic
to be intimidating – how does one go about choosing a topic that will sustain a research paper?
For this week’s journal post, you should reflect on how you went about deciding what topic
you wanted to explore for your own final paper. Did you decide on an academic topic related
to your major? Did you choose something related to your own personal interests? You could
also reflect on topics you thought about choosing, but ultimately bypassed – why did you decide
not to pursue them?

Last Completed Projects