Discover Your Inner Dog
Essay 2
Essay 2: iPaper: The Discovery Essay
For this essay, you’ll be incorporating research into a piece but not writing what you might think of as a “research paper.” In thinking of writing as inquiry, your goal with the research essay is to find something out rather than prove something. You’ll choose an issue, topic, or question that interests you and that you want to know more about under the umbrella theme of technology.* It must be a topic you wonder about, and that often will stem from your experiences and interests. As you’ll discover in doing research, there likely isn’t one answer to your question or issue—there may be multiple answers, conflicting answers, or not an answer at all.
Find at least five sources about your subject (they should not all be Internet sources; we’ll learn more about this on our library visit) that represent various points or approaches to your topic (you don’t want all of your sources to say the same thing) and print them out or make copies. (You’ll need to identify more than five sources so that you can choose among them the sources most useful to you.) Read—and reread—your sources carefully, annotating, taking notes that record both what the authors are saying and what you think about what they are saying.
After doing some brainstorming in class, you’ll then write an essay in which you explore the topic based on the sources you’ve read—not an argument paper where research feeds your opinion about the issue; rather, you’ll be exploring a topic and explaining how the research changed you instead of developing an argument in which you try to change the minds of others. And you’re building on your personal essay, so remember that just because you are incorporating sources doesn’t mean you can’t have your own voice in the piece—you are the person putting these ideas together in conversation. You’ll want to explain your knowledge on the issue before you began research and how the research has complicated your thinking. Think of it in terms of “i-search” rather than “research.” In the end, then, your paper will address 1) your interest in the issue; 2) what others have to say about the issue; 3) the significance for you in what you’ve discovered. Like with the first paper, it may likely be that it takes a whole first draft to discover what your controlling idea is, and through revision your controlling idea will come out more clearly to your audience. You might also want to be overt about the research process—you can describe, as part of your essay, how your research built upon itself. As Bruce Ballenger says, “the process of coming to know something, for the essayist, is as important as what he or she comes to know” (The Curious Reader 39). Do not limit your essay to explaining a single point of view, even if that point of view is the one you most identify with. You want sources that explain many different opinions on the topic you care about.
*Technology can be interpreted in many ways, the most obvious being daily things we take for granted: cell phones, digital cameras, wikis, blogs, iPods, Myspace, IM, video games, avatars, etc. Don’t let the term limit you into thinking that if you’re not a techie you have nothing to write about. So potential research questions might range from, “Is playing the Wii a good workout?” to “Can my Myspace page hurt my chances of getting a job?” to “What are the benefits and pitfalls of hybrid cars?”
Final Draft: 5-7 typed pages, plus a works cited page. The paper will follow MLA citation format.