From Topics to Questions

1. From Topics to Questions From The Craft of Research By Booth, Colomb, and Williams

2. Choosing/Shaping a Topic • Choose a topic you’re interested in, if you have a choice. If you don’t have a choice, try to shape the topic you’re assigned so that it allows you to pursue something you’re interested in. • If you’re forced to write about the Sino-Japanese war, maybe you want to focus on women’s role in this war. • If you’re forced to write about The Tempest, maybe you want to focus on animal imagery in the text. • If you’re forced to write about water collection systems in the West, may be you want to focus on the legal controversy over the Big Straw proposal. • So, stop and reflect on what you’ve heard and read about so far from I’m not a Racist, But . . .. What seems to you to be an interesting topic? How can you shape it? • Share some.

3. Head to the Library • Do a little research to see what kind of information is out there, what other people have written about, if sources are available. . . • After this, are you still interested? If so, move on. If not, start over.

4. Narrowing the Topic • Use modifying words and phrases to narrow your topic: conflict, description, contribution, development • Use these words to move from a phrase that names a topic: • Free will and historical inevitability in Tolstoy’s War and Peace • The history of commercial aviation • To a sentence that states a potential claim: • Tolstoy describes three battles in a way that makes free will conflict with historical inevitability. • The military contributed to the way the DC-3 developed in the early years of commercial aviation.

5. From Topic to Questions • Your job is to move beyond a summary of what you read about your topic to answering a question you have posed in response to those readings. • So, for example, a thesis that only indicates a summary to follow would be the following: • Thus there are interesting differences and similarities between the stories about the Alamo told by Mexicans and by Americans. • Whereas, one that asks a question would be formulated like this: • Do the legends about the Battle of the Alamo accurately reflect our best historical accounts? Do the historical accounts differ?

6. Four organization strategies for Research Questions • What are the parts of the topic and what larger whole is it a part of? • What is its history and what larger history is it a part of? • What kinds of categories can you find in it, and to what larger category of things does it belong? • What good is it? What can you use it for?

7. What are the parts . . . • Question the topic in a way that analyzes it into component parts and evaluates the working relationships among them: • What are the parts of the stories about the Battle of the Alamo? How do they relate to one another? Who were the participants in the stories? How to the participants relate to the place, the place to the battle, the battle to the participants, the participants to one another? • Question your topic in a way that identifies it as a working component in a larger system: • What use have politicians made of the story? What role does it have in Mexican history? In U.S. history? Who told the stories? Who listened? How does the nationality of the teller affect the story?

8. Trace History and Changes . . . • Question your topic in a way that treats it as a dynamic entity that changes through time, as something with its own history: • How did the battle develop? How have the stories developed? How have different stories developed differently? How have audiences changed? How have storytellers changed? How have motives to tell the story changed? Who told the first stories? Who were the earliest readers and listeners? Who later? • Question your topic in a way that identifies it as an episode in a larger history: • What caused the battle and the stories? What did the battle and the stories then cause? How do the stories fit into a historical sequence? What else was happening when the stories appeared? When they changed? What forces caused the stories to change?

9. Identify its Categories and Characteristics . . . • Question your topic in a way that defines its range of variation, how instances of it are like and different from one another: • What is the most typical story? How do other stories differ from this typical story? Which one is most different? How do written and oral stories differ from movie versions? How are Mexican stories different from U.S. stories? • Question your topic in a way that locates it in a larger category of things like it: • What other stories in our history are like the story of the Battle of the Alamo? What other stories are very different? What other societies have the same kind of story?

10. Determine Its Value . . . • Question your topic in regard to the value of its uses: • What good are the stories? What uses have been made of them? Have they helped or harmed people? • Question your topic in regard to the relative value of its parts and features: • Are some stories better than others? What version is the best one? The worst one? Which parts are most accurate? Which least?

11. Group and Evaluate your Questions • Which questions you’ve asked relate to development of the stories? Which relate to questioning the fact or fiction of the stories? Which ones high light differences between the stories? Which address political issues? • Identify questions that need more than a one word answer. Who, What, When and Where are important, but Why and How are more urgent and more interesting.

12. The most important Question: SO WHAT? • Three steps to getting to SO WHAT? • Name your topic: -- I am learning about/working on/studying ________ • Suggest a question: -- I am studying ________ because I want to find out who/what/when/where/whether/why/how ______ • Motivate the question: -- in order to understand how/why/what __________

13. Some examples: • I am studying repair processes for cooling systems • Because I want to find out how expert repairers analyze failures, • In order to understand howto design a computerized system that could diagnose and prevent failures.

14. Example 2: • I am working onthe motivation of Roosevelt’s early speeches • Because I want to discover whether presidents since the 30’s used those speeches to announce new policy, • In order to understand howgenerating public support for national policy has changed in the age of television.

15. The three steps: • I am studying ______________ • Because I want to find out how/who/why . . ___________ • In order to understand how/why/what . . . ____________ Work on this for a while. Then we’ll share.