Review your progress - Search your notes for an answer - Engaging sources - Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, 7th edition - Kate L. Turabian 2007

Review your progress - Search your notes for an answer
Engaging sources
Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

Regularly review your notes and storyboard to see where you are and where you have to go. Full pages indicate reasons with support; empty pages indicate work to do. Check whether you think your working hypothesis is still plausible. Do you have good reasons supporting it? Good evidence to support those reasons? Can you add new reasons or evidence?

4.5.1 Search your notes for an answer

We have urged you to find a working hypothesis or at least a question to guide your research. But some writers start with a question so vague that it evaporates as they pursue it. If that happens to you, search your notes for a generalization that might be a candidate for a working hypothesis, then work backward to find the question it answers.

Look first for questions, disagreements, or puzzles in your sources and in your reaction to them (see 2.1.3 and 4.1). What surprises you might surprise others. Try to state that surprise:

I expected the first mythic stories of the Alamo to originate in Texas, but they didn't. They originated in . . .

That tentative hypothesis suggests that the Alamo myth began as a national, not a regional, phenomenon—a modest, but promising start.

If you can't find a hypothesis in your notes, look for a pattern of ideas that might lead you to one. If you gathered data with a vague question, you probably sorted them under predictable keywords. For masks, the categories might be their origins (African, Indian, Japanese . . .), uses (drama, religion, carnival . . .), materials (gold, feather, wood, . . .), and so on. For example:

Egyptians—mummy masks of gold for nobility, wood for others.

Aztecs—masks from gold and jade buried only in the graves of the nobility.

New Guinea tribes—masks for the dead from feathers from rare birds.

Those facts could support a general statement such as, Mask-making cultures create religious masks from the most valuable material available, especially for the dead.

Once you can generate two or three such statements, try to formulate a still larger generalization that might include them all:

Many cultures invest great material and human resources in creating masks that represent their deepest values.generalization Egyptians, Aztecs, and Oceanic cultures all created religious masks out of the rarest and most valuable materials. Although in Oceanic cultures most males participate in mask-making, both the Egyptians and Aztecs set aside some of their most talented artists and craftsmen for mask-making.

If you think that some readers might plausibly disagree with that generalization, you might be able to offer it as a claim that corrects their misunderstanding.