The Aims and Process of the Research Paper

Many members of our department-and yours too, we suspect-have stopped teaching the research paper in composition courses because the papers they receive are so often disappointing and because they believe that freshmen and sophomores may not be sophisticated enough to do the kind of thinking necessary for a worthwhile research paper. These instructors say they view the research paper not simply as a review of information found in secondary sources, but as an argument with sources which expands the student's (and the reader's) view of the subject. But, they complain, students seem overwhelmed by what they find in outside sources and are incapable of weaving the information they have gathered into an argument that presents and defends their point of view. Composition textbooks and writing teachers have tried to deal with this problem in three ways, each of which has proven inadequate in some respect. One answer has been to provide better training in gathering and arranging information (that is, library and documentation skills). Though these skills have some value, they still are likely to have little impact on the quality of the papers students write in composition courses or in other courses because academic research is a process of inquiry, problem-solving, and argument, not simply an information-gathering process. A second answer has been to place considerable stress on the argumentative nature of the research paper. But though academic research papers contain arguments, they cannot be called argumentative in aim or structure because they do not focus on altering the values, ideas, or emotional attitudes of an audience or on moving the audience to action of some kind: intellectual, emotional, or physical. The kind of research papers scholars write and reward their students