Chapter 30 & 32 Response

Chapter 30: Planning and Managing Your Research Project

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In this chapter of The Bedford Guide for College Writers, the authors give a suggested order of operations for how to go about the process of researching. In my copy of this textbook, the overview of this process is on page 647, but I have found that there are slight differences from other copies. So, the overview may be on another page in the same general area in another copy of the book. Below is this order of operations, followed by short descriptions of each part of the process, based on the overview and other parts of the chapter.

The Research Process:

1. Engage - find an interesting topic, develop a question about that topic, and proceed to answer your question (this will be your thesis)
2. Inquire - come up with research questions to guide your research
3. Organize - decide on a plan or method of how to research, as well as how to organize information you gather through your research
4. Investigate - gather source info, quote, paraphrase, and summarize sources, and begin your bibliography or "Works Cited" page.
5. Search - look for reliable and relevant information to answer your research questions
6. Synthesize - integrate source information to support the answers to your research questions. While doing this, make sure to cite sources in order to avoid plagiarism and use sources to support your thesis.

My Reaction: While this chapter was very short, it did a pretty good job summing up all the different research strategies and techniques, which is impressive. Although, there was not that much information in this chapter that was new to me. That said, it was nice to get a review of things I have already learned about the research process.

Chapter 32: Finding Sources in the Library, on the Internet, and in the Field

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Personally, I am surprised how detailed this chapter is. It includes little tips and tricks for researching in all three ways: in the library, on the internet, and in the field. I found that I already knew quite a bit about gathering research from the library and the internet, but that I didn't know as much about the different ways to gather information in the field. This chapter definitely educated me about that. According to the authors, one can get information in the field by interviewing, observing, using questionnaires/conducting surveys, corresponding, and attending public and online events. I may be more likely to gather more information in the field because I have been made aware of the different ways in which to go about it.

Professionally, I think I will refer to this chapter in the near future. It contains a lot of very specific information, such as names of particular websites to visit and search through for certain types of information and lists of various kinds of library resources. There is one tip in particular that I think will be most helpful; when searching on a database, if you type a word or partial word followed by an asterisk (*), it will search for all the related terms for that word. For example, if I enter celeb* into the search bar, it will search for celeb, celebs, celebrity, and celebrities. This little trick will save me time searching for each term individually, which will be very helpful.

Written by Hayley Leach