Wadsworth Guide to Research Summary
The Wadsworth Guide to Research book is separated into four parts. They are: Preparing for Research, Conducting Research, Reporting on Research, and lastly Formatting Your Research and further broken down into 15 chapters within these four parts.
Part 1: Preparing for Research
In preparing for research a student should consider how contextual factors will influence their research. These can include the topic, purpose, audience, and the author based on a rhetorical situation. By considering these elements you let the rhetorical situation influence how you research and the conclusions that you draw from your research.
The rhetorical situation has four parts: purpose, audience, topic, and …show more content…
Static resources usually do not change after they have been published, such as books, paintings, or films. Syndicated resources are under the same general title but are released over time. Such as magazines, TV shows, and blogs. Dynamic resources never get published in a final form and are always changing. Examples include: live plays, wikis, and field research.
If you choose to include primary research in your plan you can conduct observations and interviews with your subject. Another method of research is to conduct a survey. When you conduct a survey you will need to decide the group you will use, write the questions, and decide what you need to know from the participants. You also need to make sure to get permission to conduct your survey, either from the board at your school or for each individual person. This could be done by just including a letter to the student who is taking the …show more content…
You made a claim in your thesis, the rest of your paper should support that claim with facts and evidence. You can do this by using an approach that specifically appeals to your audience using ethos, pathos, or logos. Ethos would be used to appeal to someone who relies on credibility and authority, pathos to appeal to emotions, and logos for an audience that appeals to logic and reason. Your paper should also offer evidence, Evidence can include: statistical data, experimental results, expert opinions, personal experience, and observations. You may find it necessary to include counter arguments in your paper. You can provide counterarguments using rebuttals and qualifiers.
When deciding what evidence to include in your paper you should consider who your audience is the timeliness and relevance of the evidence, and the resource of your evidence. You will then decide the pattern of your argument and how to organize your argument within your paper. For example, you can organize chronologically, or by most to least important. Some common argument patterns are evaluation, compare and contrast, cause and effect, definition, and proposal.
Your argumentative paper should include a introduction and conclusion. In writing an introduction you can ask yourself some questions including: why is your topic important, what is the audiences opinion of your topic, what is your authority on the topic, and how well does your audience know the topic.