by Cal Newport
Step 3
Seek a Second Opinion
At this point you should have an interesting topic and a targeted thesis. You’re well on your way toward a standout paper, but don’t get too far ahead of yourself. It’s time to take a step back.
More than a few students have dived deep into the paper-writing process, supported by what they thought was a compelling thesis, only to find out many pages later that their premise was not as strong as it initially seemed. Perhaps they fail to find enough evidence to support the argument. Perhaps they stumble across another source that has already made the exact same point. Or, as is often the case, perhaps they find their thesis to be too broad to be succinctly argued within the scope of a paper assignment.
The thesis-hunting tips of the last step help eliminate this possibility, but they’re not enough by themselves. Once you think you have a good thesis, a final step remains before diving fully into the research and writing process. As Rielle, a straight-A student from Brown, explains: “I often talk to a professor to clarify my ideas before I begin writing.” This is great advice. For every research paper and significant critical analysis essay (i.e., assignments more than just a few pages long), you should make a habit of discussing your targeted thesis idea with your professor. Go to office hours, or make an appointment, explain your topic and thesis, then ask the following questions:
1. Is my idea appropriate for the assignment?
2. Does it cover too much?
3. Is it too simple?
For a critical analysis essay, if the professor deems your thesis appropriate, this is a good sign that you are not going to get stuck. You can now move ahead with confidence. For a research paper, if the professor deems your thesis appropriate, take advantage of this time to explain some of the sources you plan to examine. The professor will likely have some additional sources to suggest. Write these down. This just saved you some serious research time! For both types of papers, if the professor isn’t enthusiastic about your thesis idea, then he or she will likely help you adjust it into something that is reasonable.
When you leave this meeting, which should require only ten to twenty minutes, you will have confidence in the foundation of your paper. You can now move full speed into the research stage without fear of reaching a devastating dead end later on in the process. It’s amazing how many students ignore this incredible resource. One simple meeting can make the difference between a standout work and an incoherent dud.
Remember, this step is not intended as a shortcut. If you skipped the previous step and show up at office hours without a targeted idea, the professor is not going to give you one for free. However, as Christine from Harvard explains: “They’ll rarely refuse to listen if they see you’ve thought things out in advance.”
Step 4
Research like a Machine
Not surprisingly, research is the domain of the research paper. For a critical analysis essay, your sources are already specified, and there are probably only one or two of them. Therefore, when working on an essay, you can skip this step and move on to Step #5 (Craft a Powerful Story), which describes how to organize your argument.
For research papers, however, the following advice is crucial. Why? Because how you research can make or break your paper-writing efforts. If your strategy is haphazard—as is the case with most students—then two immediate problems will arise. First, the writing process will become frustrating and tedious, since you will be forced to continually stop and seek out new sources to extend your argument. Second, and more important, the resulting paper will be weak. A good argument requires a solid grasp of all relevant information. You want all the necessary facts and ideas to be at your fingertips, easily manipulated, sourced, and shuffled, as you build your case. If your sources are incomplete and disorganized, then your paper will be, too.
On the other hand, you can also run the risk of spending too much time on research. Many eager students have succumbed to the horrors of research recursion syndrome—an unhealthy need to go find “just one more source,” often leading to hours and hours of wasted time, dorm rooms overwhelmed with teetering stacks of books, and one seriously sleep-deprived student. This is grind territory, and you should avoid it at all costs. So while at first glance it may seem easier than choosing a thesis or writing the paper itself, in fact the research step of paper writing is easy to get wrong.
Fortunately, straight-A students have figured out a way to walk the research tightrope—getting the information they need without becoming lost amid the endless available sources. Their strategy can be summarized by a simple phrase: Research like a machine. They follow a system—a mechanical process, the same for every paper—that produces consistent high-quality results. Feed them a thesis, watch their wheels turn, and then out pops a set of photocopied, organized, and annotated notes. Their system ensures that the quality of their research is sufficient to fuel a standout paper and at the same time requires the minimum amount of time to achieve this goal.
Sounds pretty cool, right? But how does it work? Their system is based on these four steps:
1. Find sources.
2. Make personal copies of all sources.
3. Annotate the material.
4. Decide if you’re done. (If the answer is “no,” then loop back to #1.)
That’s it. The devil, of course, is in the details. So let’s take a closer look at what each of the steps entails.
1. Find Sources
There are two types of sources: general and specific. As described in Step #2, the former include overviews of your topic (i.e., biography or textbook), whereas the latter focus on specific arguments (i.e., a journal article or book about a specific event or idea). For a college-level paper, most of your best information is going to come from specific sources. The hard part, of course, is finding them.
There are two strategies that can help you accomplish this goal. The first is stolen straight from Step #2: Start with general sources and then look in their bibliographies for more targeted resources. As David, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, says: “Once you have two or three materials that you like, it’s all about the bibliographies…find out where the author found the fuel for his arguments and go check those out.” In Step #2, I suggested that you ask your professor or browse the course reserve shelf to find some of these general sources. Another place to look is your library’s online card catalog. This sounds obvious, but using an online catalog correctly is not a trivial task. Just typing in keywords might not turn up every book that deals with your topic of interest. You need some more advanced tricks.
One such trick is to take advantage of the Library of Congress (LOC) topic classifications. What are these? The Library of Congress tries to classify all books into one large hierarchy of topics. For example, Heinrich Harrer’s fascinating book The White Spider (an account of the first team to ascend the infamous North Face of the Eiger Mountain) is described by the following two classifications:
1. Mountaineering—Switzerland—Eiger—History
2. Eiger (Switzerland)—Description and travel
When you find a book in an online card catalog, its corresponding LOC topic classifications should be listed. The cool part is that these topics should also be hyperlinked. That is, if you found an entry for The White Spider, you could click on Mountaineering—Switzerland—Eiger—History to return a list of every book in the library under this classification. Therefore, if you find one general source on a topic, then you can easily find many others. And once you have found general sources, you can turn to their bibliographies to find something more specific.
The second strategy for finding specific sources is to search for them directly. This approach is important. Not every specific source relevant to your thesis can be found in the bibliography of a general source. This is particularly true for more recent scholarship. Books take a long time to write; if a paper was published only within th
e last few years, it is probably too soon to find a general tome that cites it.
The problem here is that specific sources can be difficult to find. For example, continuing with the Eiger topic introduced above, let’s say your thesis within this topic is: “The many failed attempts to ascend the North Face of the Eiger played an important role in the development of Swiss cultural identity during the first half of the twentieth century.” Finding a general source about the Eiger, such as The White Spider, is easy enough. But finding a targeted source on the impact of the Eiger on Swiss cultural identity will be significantly more complicated. Simply typing “the impact of the Eiger on Swiss cultural identity” into the library card catalog probably won’t turn up many hits. So how do you locate these elusive specific sources? There are four main search tactics.
Search Tactic #1: Break Up Your Query into General Chunks
If you can reduce your specific query to a group of related, yet succinct, general searches, you will have a much better chance of finding a relevant source. Following the Eiger example, you might try:
• Alpine hiking Switzerland culture
• Switzerland cultural identity
• Alpine hiking
• Mountaineering Switzerland
Any one of these more general queries could turn up a source that either directly references your thesis or makes a point that supports your thesis. With practice, you will get better at constructing these general probes aimed at illuminating a specific idea.
Search Tactic #2: Use Journal Databases
As mentioned, specific sources are more likely to be scholarly articles than books. Your library card catalog does not index articles.
Therefore, as Chris from Dartmouth recommends, you should consider “article database searches (like JSTOR) on the specific topic.”
How do you find these databases? Your library Web site should contain a list of available electronic resources. At some point during your freshman year, you will probably be given an orientation on this topic. (Even if you sleep through it, as most of us do, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.) This list of resources is usually broken up by academic concentration (i.e., Political Science, Anthropology, and so forth). Go to the concentration relevant to your paper, and you should see a list of searchable archives. Many of these resources will be databases of scholarly articles, so search these focused databases using the general search term chunks described in the preceding tactic and see what pops up.
If your topic is interdisciplinary, meaning that it draws from multiple academic concentrations, follow Chris’s advice and try a big database like JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org), which contains scholarly articles on a large variety of academic topics.
Search Tactic #3: When in Doubt, Google
“Google is your friend, first and foremost,” says David from Dartmouth. This is good advice—as Google is a great tool—but it should be used with some caution. A good rule of thumb is: Don’t cite Web sites. Academics don’t trust them. Journal articles go through extensive peer-reviewing before they are published, and academic books are written by experts and rigorously edited. On Web sites, however, anything goes. Therefore, they’re worthless in terms of supporting an argument. Referencing Web sites is something you do in high school. If you do this in college, be prepared to experience the wrath of your professor.
This being said, Google is still immensely useful. Not for finding Web sites to cite, but for finding Web sites that reference books and articles relevant to your thesis. For example, a search for “Eiger and Swiss Cultural Identity” might actually turn up some Web sites dealing with, or related to, this obscure issue. The Google search algorithm is a lot smarter than the one used by card catalogs, so even very complicated queries can turn up surprisingly accurate results. If you’re lucky, some of these Web sites will mention specific sources—a book name or article title. Now you can look up these in your card catalog, and then treat them like any other formal source.
Search Tactic #4: Ask a Librarian
Most college libraries are staffed with reference librarians who want nothing more than to help you find the information that you seek. It’s what they’re paid to do, and they’re great at it. Too many students, however, ignore this wonderful resource. Here you have experts who can save you hours of struggle by conducting advanced searches on your behalf; yet most students never think to take advantage of the opportunity.
Making a visit to the reference desk should be one of your first steps when researching a challenging assignment. Simply explain your topic and thesis to the librarian, and he or she will walk you through several searches. Not only will this identify some specific sources that you may have otherwise missed, but it will also expose you to new library resources and databases that you can now use for future projects. The more time you spend with reference librarians, the better you will become at finding solid material on your own.
2. Make Personal Copies of All Sources
How you handle the sources makes a big difference in the overall efficiency of the paper-writing process. Though there are many ways to deal with the book chapters and articles relevant to your research efforts, many of the straight-A students interviewed for this book favored the following strategy: Make a photocopy or printout of all relevant material. If you find a book that has two chapters related to your topic, photocopy those two chapters. If you find an important journal article, photocopy the entire article. If you find an article online, or a relevant Web site, print it out. The goal is to create your own personal hard copy of all sources.
The advantages of this approach are numerous. First, these hard copies are portable. It’s easier to carry around a stack of photocopies than a stack of books and journals, so you can take your research with you to your secret study spots or office hours. Second, the information is more accessible. No flipping through big tomes or searching your computer hard drive; all the relevant information is stored in one condensed stack. You can now physically organize your sources, for example, by putting them into piles by author, clustering relevant arguments together with paper clips, or dividing them into folders labeled by subject. As Sean, a straight-A student from Yale, explains: “It’s often easier to grasp something when you have a hard copy in front of you.” Third, you can mark them up with impunity. “Printouts and Xeroxes of source info are often superior to books or digital copies,” explains Christine from Harvard, “since you can annotate them to death.” Feel free to underline things, highlight, draw arrows, cross out sections, or put big stars next to important points.
In general, this approach maximizes the control you have over your information, ensuring that your sources work for you. However, there are a couple of important caveats to remember. First, make sure you label each photocopy with all of the information needed to later construct a formal citation. For example, if you photocopy a book chapter, jot down on the first page the name of the book, the author(s), the publisher and its location, and the copyright date. Or, if you prefer, follow Christine’s advice and simply “make a photocopy of the title and copyright info” as found in the front of the book, so you can use it later while constructing the works cited for your paper and ensure that you don’t find yourself “running back to the library at the last moment for citation info.”
Second, photocopy each source’s bibliography. This way, if you come across an interesting reference in one of your photocopies, you will have easy access to the full citation attached to the reference. For articles, the bibliography is almost always listed immediately following the article. For books using the endnote format, you might have to flip to the back to find the bibliography for a specific chapter.
3. Annotate the Material
Finding a source, of course, is just the first step. A stack of photocopied pages is worthless if you don’t know what information it contains and how it might be useful to your paper. You need to review the sources and annotate them with a conci
se description of the important information, if any, that they contain.
Be careful how you proceed here. Your first instinct might be to follow the advice described in Part Two about how to take notes on your reading assignments. Don’t do this—it’s overkill. For now, you should be content to follow the advice of David from Dartmouth, who recommends that you “skim, skim, skim.” Specifically, read through the source quickly. Every time you pass by an important definition, idea, or opinion that seems relevant to your thesis, jot down (on your computer or by hand) the page number and a quick description. For example, if the author argues a particular point of interest, write only what this point is—there is no need to also copy down the evidence he uses to support it as you would for notes on a reading assignment. If the source is a book, then, as Anna from Dartmouth explains: “Pick out only the chapters that relate to the specific aspect of the topic that you are interested in…it is not necessary to read the entire book!” When you’re finished, staple your annotations to your personal copy of the corresponding source.