A short thought on writing "research" papers.

I'm working on one again, hopefully it will be accepted to the Proceedings of the conference I'm presenting the data at this summer.

I've gone back to the old, old method, the one I've used since fifth grade at least: reading through my sources with a stack of 3 by 5 cards next to me. Every time I find a fact or bit of information I want to use, I write it down on the card, along with the last names of the author and year of publication. If I'm quoting directly, I put the phrase in quotation marks, otherwise, I paraphrase as I go. (I probably don't need to do that, really: I can remember my way of writing something vs. the way another author does).

I don't know who taught me to do it this way. It might have been my parents, who, I think, used similar methods when working on their graduate degrees. Or it might have been a particularly dedicated teacher. I just know that it's a method that works well for me: I can make an outline, then flip through the cards and make little notes in the corner of each card where it fits in the outline. Then I just put the cards in order and start writing. (I still have huge shoeboxes of cards from my doctoral dissertation stored in the guest room closet at my parents' house).

I also make a "bibliographic information" card for each source, for when I need to do the Literature Cited.

As I said, I've done it this way for, gosh, 30 years now. Whenever I needed to write a "report," or, later, a "research paper," and now, when I write journal manuscripts. (I still remember an early paper - sixth grade - on mountain lions. I got a good grade on it; probably because I knew how to do the background research and that kind of writing actually came fairly easily to me).

But I think the years of practice are what make it fairly easy. And I kind of intuitively know what's "research-with-citations" and what would be "plagiarism." And I think that's a hard thing for students to learn without actually doing it. I've had problems with students who think writing an "honest" paper can only be done if you directly quote (and cite) all background sources; they have somewhere along the line picked up the idea that paraphrasing or "putting it in your own words" (as my teachers always said) was plagiarizing, even if you cite the source. And nothing could be further from the truth: actually, paraphrasing-with-citation is the correct way to write these kinds of papers. (And it's EXCRUCIATING to read a paper that's nothing but cobbled-together quotations from a diversity of sources. Not to mention that it's hard to grade because there's really none of the student's work on display; you don't know if they actually understand or are merely parroting.)

But I learned when it was and was not appropriate to quote directly (and in rare cases, it is) by doing it. I think I wrote "research papers" every year of school from - as I said - fifth grade on.

Another thing I learned was how to find the best background material, and to winnow out things not necessary. One problem some of my students get into is that they'll write 10 page introductions full of intense natural-history detail of the species they happened to use in their experiment, but none of that information will actually be all that pertinent to the experiment. For example, they might have done a study examining time-of-day versus ant foraging activity, and while they have all kinds of information about the different types of worker ants, and what chemical is in their sting...they have nothing about daily rhythms of animals or about ant foraging. I make a point that sometimes if you can't find information on your exact species, similar information on a closely related taxonomic group (like the daily rhythms information) is fine to include - but that it's not necessary to talk about the process of development of the larvae, because that's really tangential to what's being studied here.

And again, I think that's something that comes with experience. I spent enough years of getting drafts of papers handed back marked up, with "UNNECESSARY" or similar written in the margin next to a section that didn't really play an immediate role with what I was researching. So now, I can kind of sense what is necessary and what is not.

(And I admit, I feel a tiny bit of joy when, while reading a paper that I've mostly written off as being tangential to my interest, I run across a bit of information that I can USE. Especially when it's something I was thinking about with my own data.).

But all of that - skill and comfort with writing - come with experience. And from having talked to students, and particularly talking to students who have children in the schools right now - it seems that a lot of schools aren't doing that. They're not requiring papers with research, or essays, or much writing at all. (One of our former students, who worked in the office for a while, was livid about how poorly her son was being taught in that area: she actually went to the school board to complain. I'm not sure if it did any good. Her main complaint was that the teacher was telling the kids to hand-copy articles out of the encyclopedia. So not only were they essentially being told plagiarism was OK (or at least, "not being told it was wrong") but they were being pointed to what was not really the best source. (And yeah, I know: as a kid, I used the old World Book many times. But eventually I learned that there were better sources out there))

I don't know. It's harder for students to have a "good" experience planning and doing an independent research project when they're not comfortable with writing or with doing background research. (And it's SO EASY now: we have BioOne, we have Ebsco Host, we have JSTOR - you can just go online and find all kinds of peer-reviewed, scientific-literature articles on a topic). It means I have to do more "catch up" work in terms of telling them how to write, and in terms of correcting things when I grade. I've had people get angry with me when I graded them down for not having a Literature Cited section (they say: "I don't know what that IS!" My response is: you knew you were required to have one; you could have come and asked me.)

I don't know. I'm generally not a strict, "back to basics, 3-Rs" type mindset, but I do think schoolkids need to do more writing - and have that writing graded fairly rigorously - than a lot of them do now. I know it's hard when you have multiple classes and when you might have 30 students per class, but still.