Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

Preface for teachers

This book was written in the belief that research matters and that your students can, and should, do it.

We have what we think are good reasons for those beliefs. Research matters because

✵ it is ubiquitous in the workplaces of our information age, especially among those who do not think of themselves as researchers;

✵ the experience of doing research is the best preparation for a world in which we constantly depend on the claims of experts;

✵ the questioning mind-set of a researcher fosters the kind of critical thinking that students need now more than ever;

✵ the ability to do research can free us from the tyranny of false authorities, including our own prejudices.

We believe students can do research because

✵ the core activities of research—finding information to solve a problem—are a part of everyone's daily life;

✵ the core elements of a research argument—giving good reasons and evidence to convince someone to act or think differently—are also a part of everyone's daily life;

✵ the two of us have taught thousands of students to do it, starting as early as the eighth grade.

Why then do so few students actually do it well? Because, we think, the research they do in school is framed in a way that cuts off, rather than enables, students' intuitions about how one uses information to solve a problem or to convince others to change what they do or think; also because schools have not, for the most part, helped students understand why the distinctive forms of research and argument we expect in school are rational applications of what they already know how to do.

This book “repurposes” the ideas, principles, and practical wisdom in two earlier guides we wrote for advanced students and practicing researchers—The Craft of Research (3rd ed., 2008) and the Turabian guide to theses and dissertations (A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed., 2007). We describe what we've done with that odd, new-media verb repurpose because we have not approached this “beginners'” text in the usual way: We have done more than simply translate our advice from researcher-speak to student-speak, though we have done that. We have done more than eliminate what is beyond the experience or resources of beginners, though we have done some of that too. But, most of all, we have refused to redefine the task of research, distorting it in the interests of simplifying it.

Too many students have arrived in our classes with false—and damaging—ideas of research: that its core activity is collecting information; that the writing that researchers do is pure report and the writer pure conduit; that in the workplace researchers are those who look up information for other, more important people to use; that in the academy, the only reason to do research is some quirky “interest” in a subject no one else cares about. These views, predominant among the students we see, handicap them not just for writing what their college teachers ask of them, but for their entire career as learners, citizens, and workers.

Research is above all about having a purpose, about solving problems. Its most important activities happen before and after collecting information. And it depends far more on thinking than on doggedness in the library or lab, or over a keyboard, though it does also depend on that. Although this book will help students write papers more pleasing to their teachers, its chief design is to lead students to develop a truer, more useful, and more attractive under-standing of research.

We will confess to harboring a quiet hope that we might inspire some impressive careers in research. But chiefly we aim to set students off with a way of thinking about research—and some tools for doing it—that will enable them to live and work thoughtfully in an age of information, too often of misinformation. Research is learned by doing, so this guide (though not a traditional textbook) is firmly based in the how-to. We have designed it so that a student can, if our appeals to a larger understanding fail, interact with it with only one practical question in mind: What do I do next? But we have also designed it so that such a practical student might have gained a new mind-set at the end of the process.

In repurposing our earlier work, we have reconceived it to suit the beginning researcher. Most of the topics are the same, as are all of the principles and some of the advice, but everything has been recast. Because they have seen so little research writing, students will find many more examples, models, and templates to make the principles more concrete. They will find many more explanations of the rationales behind academic research practices and more examples of how they relate to other practices more familiar to them. Where we emphasized options for advanced researchers, for these students we emphasize the prototypes against which advanced researchers measure those options but that these student do not yet know. But in all of this, we have preserved those core activities and practices that make research what it is.

This book has three parts:

Part 1, “Writing Your Paper,” is a guide to producing the paper, from assignment to debriefing a teacher's comments. This part is designed so that students can engage it in three ways: to gain an overview of the research process and its rationales, to learn about the specific stages of that process, and to perform the specific actions that go into those stages. We present this material as a coherent sequence but emphasize throughout the true messiness of the process.

Part 2, “Citing Sources,” offers guidance on issues of style in bibliographic citations. It presents models for three common citation styles: Chicago, MLA, and APA. This part is intended for reference, to be consulted as the need arises. It does include, however, one chapter on the general theory and practice of citation. We have limited its coverage significantly, to those sources students are most likely to find. Where a style offers options, we have usually presented the simplest or the most common and ignored the rest.

Part 3, “Style,” offers guidance on issues of style ranging from spelling and punctuation to the forms of numbers. It generally follows the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., 2010). This part is intended only for reference, to be consulted as the need arises. Here, too, we have limited the coverage to those matters we judge to be most useful to students.

An appendix covers the format for class papers. A second offers a glossary of grammatical and other technical terms used in the book. A third is a guide to reference works that students can use to get their work started.

There is a teacher's guide available at www.turabian.org. We do hope you will consult it.

Gregory G. Colomb

Joseph M. Williams