A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018
Review your progress
Engaging your sources
Research and writing
Regularly review your notes and storyboard to see where you are and where you have to go. In a storyboard, full pages indicate reasons with support; empty pages indicate work to do. Consider whether 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?
4.4.1 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 working 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 working 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 use the most valuable materials available to create religious masks, 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.
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.
4.4.2 Invent Your Question
Now comes a tricky part. It’s like reverse engineering: you’ve found the answer to a question that you haven’t yet asked, so you have to reason backward to invent the question that your new generalization answers. In this case, it might be What signs indicate the significance of masks in the societies of those who make and use them? As paradoxical as it may seem, experienced researchers often discover their question after they answer it, the problem they should have posed after they solve it.
4.4.3 Re-sort Your Notes
If none of that helps, try re-sorting your notes. When you first selected keywords for your notes, you identified general concepts that could organize not just your evidence but your thinking. If you chose keywords representing those concepts carefully, you can re-sort your notes in different ways to get a new slant on your material. If your keywords no longer seem relevant, review your notes to create new ones and reshuffle again.