Finding a Research Question
Planning for an Answer
Finding and Engaging Sources
Planning your Argument
Planning a First Draft
Drafting your Paper
Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing Sources
100
This 3-step sentence helps you identify a worthy question and is referred to with a 3-letter acronym. It is better than a focused topic and prevents a “data dump.”
What is TQS (Topic + Question + Significance)?
100
More flexible than outlines, this is like an outline broken into pieces and spread over several pages, with lots of space for adding data and ideas as you go. You can leave its pages unfinished until you are ready to fill them, and you can move pages around without reprinting every time you try out a new organization.
What is a storyboard?
100
This kind of evidence offers firsthand evidence, reported by whoever first produced or collected the data.
What are Primary Sources?
100
Someone who would be interested in your question and who knows as much about it as you did before you started your research.
What is your target reader?
100
You should do this when you can state what a source says more clearly or concisely than the source does, or when your argument depends on the details in a source but not on its specific words.
What is Paraphrase?
200
This is the first crucial step in your research writing process and ensures that you know what information to look for and what information to include.
What is your research question?
200
This is the most promising answer to your research question. It is useful to research, guided by possible answers. You will then see more readily which data might support (or contradict) a possible answer, helping you focus your reading even more. This is the one answer that seems most promising and will eventually become your claim.
What is your Working Hypothesis?
200
This kind of evidence offers third hand reports of what others reported in secondary reports.
What are Tertiary Sources?
200
Your working hypothesis turns into this, once it is off probation. Sometimes called a thesis.
What is a claim?
200
You should not do this if readers need more than just the gist of what a source is saying.
What is summarizing?
300
The Core of your Argument that answers the first three questions, What is the answer to your question? Why should I believe that? And how do I know that?
What are claim, reason, and evidence?
300
These are the sentences that back up your answer to the research question.
What are reasons?
300
These are the types of sources you would use to learn what others have written about your topic, and to find models for your own writing and argument. As well as opposing points of view.
What are Secondary Sources?
300
Sometimes you need this if your readers question an argument not because they object to its evidence or see an alternative interpretation of events, but because they cannot see its logic.
What is a warrant?
300
When quoting for four or fewer lines, use this type of quotation.
What is a run-in quotation?
400
This 4th step of your argument ensures that not only did you find what supports your claim, but also that you found what might work against your argument, or at least complicate it.
What is Acknowledgement and Response of Counter Viewpoints?
400
This is what you create as soon as you have a working hypothesis and a few reasons. It is your quick response to “So how’s your paper going? What do you expect to say?”
What is your elevator story?
400
These are subjected to a high scrutiny screening by trained experts and specialist that judge for value and quality and reliability.
What are Library- Quality Sources?
400
1) Do not organize your report as a story of your research. 2) Do not patch together quotations, summaries of sources, or downloads from the web. 3) Do not mechanically organize your paper around the terms of your assignment.
What are Unhelpful Plans to Avoid?
400
This means you state what you want your readers to get out of it of a quotation. This is another way of saying that you should explain to your reader whether the evidence complicates or supports your reasoning.
What is interpreting complex quotations?
500
Evaluating this ensures that the answer you have found is worth knowing. Once you find a question that you like, expect that readers will ask you this, “so what?”
What is significance?
500
Composed of facts that need no support beyond a reference to a reliable source.
What is evidence?
500
When taking useful notes of your sources, these are the 3 spaces you should provide for, within your note-template.
What are (1) Summary and Paraphrase, (2) quotations, and (3) reactions, questions and further ideas (how it supports or complicates)?
500
Current Situation, research question, significance of the question, and answer.
What is your working introduction OR 4-part Introduction?
500
In order to prevent plagiarism, know that this is not an excuse.
What is ignorance?
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