A Larger Intellectual Landscape
The idea of an “intellectual landscape” for your writing comes from an article on Common Core and the state of public schools:
In pre-kindergarten, for instance, students should learn to form an opinion about an experience or a text. By first grade, they should be able to give reasons that explain their opinions. From third grade to sixth grade, they should learn to structure their arguments in an essay. And as they move through junior high and high school, students should learn to map their ideas onto a larger intellectual landscape and make the crucial move of acknowledging and engaging opposing arguments.
Throughout it all, students learn that arguing is not synonymous with fighting — its primary goal is not to destroy contradicting viewpoints, but to engage them in a way that reveals hidden dimensions of a problem.
~Gerald Graff & Steve Benton, “Great Teachers Can’t Save America’s Schools”
The term for for this kind of engagement with other viewpoints and ideas is dialectical, which you should understand as a push away from exposition and toward argumentative discourse.
Be sure you don’t mistake that for argument, however; keep coming back to that quotation’s assertion that writers should “map their ideas onto a larger intellectual landscape and make the crucial move of acknowledging and engaging opposing arguments.”
This should remind you of the purpose of writing and the universal process we can use to write, especially the river-writing metaphor from “The Age of the Essay.” With that in mind, your research-driven project will be an essay in two forms:
- an online publication or Google Doc with hyperlinks and 21st-century citations
- an MLA-formatted paper in the traditional research format to be submitted to Google Classroom
The first version of this essay will not have a works cited page. It may be published to a website like Medium or shared through social media. It may also just be a reformatted Google Doc with a greater emphasis on hyperlinks and connectivity.
The MLA-formatted paper is the academic artifact you’re used to writing in school. It must follow all MLA guidelines, and it will be checked for originality, source work, and citations.
One major focus of a dialectical research paper is on validating sources and incorporating a variety of perspectives and information. That makes the writing process as much a test of resource management and self-direction as it is a test of writing and researching skills.
Note, too, that research paper can be tied explicitly into the other required projects for the final semester — through subject matter, audience, and more.
Writing Resources
The best research-driven essays are surprising and engaging, so you should start with a review of Paul Graham’s “Age of the Essay” from our unit on essays. You should follow that philosophy as you apply the universal writing guide’s step-by-step directions:
Done carefully, that is everything necessary to explore a subject of your choosing through research, synthesis, and dialectical writing. You would rely on your in-class focus and use of feedback to solve any difficulties.
There is a model text, however. In most cases, this is where you will be required to start. This version is reformatted for annotation:
In that essay, Jesness raises an issue, explores its history and current state, and then offers a solution. It was published in Harper’s and online through Reason. To make his case, he relies on personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and empirical data. The essay is also structured in sections that can be directly emulated.
Since this model can be emulated effectively, there are step-by-step guides available to you:
- Research Paper Guide | tinyurl.com/sisyphus-researches
- Simplified Guide | tinyurl.com/sisyphus-simple-research
- Super-Simple Guide | tinyurl.com/super-simple-research
This may be exactly what you need to insure a strong paper. You may have done enough research-driven writing in the past to have developed your own systems, but even then, a step-by-step, line-by-line guide is a tremendous help. It will produce an effective essay, if you follow it carefully.
MLA Research Resources
The crux of a research-driven, dialectical essay is the research itself. For that, and for the validation and citation at the heart of research, you need an Internet connection and the organizational and autodidactic skills we’ve emphasized all year.
Brewster High School, for instance, now has a resource hub through the iLC:
This has everything you need. The tabs include citation machines that will walk you through works cited pages and bibliographies; digital databases that offer articles beyond what you can (and should) find through Google and other search engines; and, most importantly, an entire section dedicated to reviewing the basics of MLA research.
At the start of your work on this project, you should set aside time in class just to run through this crash course in research skills. That will serve two purposes:
- It will fill in any gaps in the skills themselves, allowing you to be much more effective in pursuing your self-selected research topic.
- It will generate significant evidence of every skill and trait on this list.
There are other online courses and resources for MLA research skills. Stick with Brewster’s own site, and you’ll also have access to Mr. Breen’s help in the iLC; if you branch out, however, you should start with the Purdue Online Writing Lab.
Statements of Purpose
The research guide includes a section on asking an essential question, and the step-by-step directions for writing include the thesis work you’d expect. It is still necessary to separate out the purpose of this research paper from the rest of the process. We can do this through the writing of statements of purpose:
This instructional post works for all project-based learning, although you will see a primary focus on the “Senior Talk” expected of you later in the year. Research-driven essays must also have a larger purpose beyond the parameters of an assignment.
Combining this post’s exercises with the research guide will lead to the best results. Pay attention to how this is assigned formally. It may not be, because a traditional thesis is enough to carry a research paper.
As always, you should also ask questions here, over email, and in class. The earlier and more effectively you advocate, the better your research-driven essay will be.