Systematic Strategies for Humanities Research-Paper Writing: Part One

By Sørina Higgins, Consultant

via GIPHY

Hello, fellow grad students in the humanities! It’s just about time to start thinking about those big end-of-term papers you’ll write for most of your grad classes, those 20- to 30-pagers that hover somewhere between an exhausting school assignment and the draft of a professional article. Well, here are some suggestions for you to consider applying to the process of researching and writing those seminar papers. Hopefully these ideas will be useful for you whether you’re about to write your first one or your last one ever. Either way, congrats! This is a big deal; you’re about to produce some original research to add to the scholarly conversation, and it’s a chance to really dig into doing what you love, the thing you came to grad school for. I’ll try to help smooth the way here so that you don’t have to figure out the research process for yourself. And feel free to add additional strategies in the comments below!

First, plan ahead. Set aside a day well before the deadline (at least a month; six weeks or two months is better) in order to start preliminary research and order books. Don’t panic; you needn’t begin writing the paper at this point, but you do need to provide enough lead time for getting materials through interlibrary loan, and you probably want to at least glance over the most relevant and/or recent scholarship to make sure someone else hasn’t done exactly what you want to do. At this point, you can do a few of the steps below. You don’t need to do all of them now, and you can probably get away with never doing some of them, but the more of this background research you complete early on, the smoother the writing process will be and the better the final product.

1. Choose authors, texts, themes, time periods, events, or issues of interest, as relevant to the project and your field. Make sure to read and reread the assignment prompt carefully and ask your professor for clarification if needed. But here’s something to consider: I don’t think “choosing a topic” really works for serious research. Instead, I recommend picking a field of interest, narrowing it down considerably, and honing your focus until you develop a Research Question.
2. Crafting your Research Question is an important step that many inexperienced scholars omit or rush past. The better your initial Research Question, the more successful and less stressful the whole process will be. There are lots of reasons for this: Your question guides the type of research you’ll do, what sources you’ll investigate, the kind of research design or method you’ll employ, even the scope and structure of the paper. So don’t “pick a topic”; take the time to develop a truly workable question instead. There is lots of advice available about the characteristics of good and bad Research Questions; here are a few I’ve found particularly helpful. The question must be researchable by you and must fit into the rest of this semester—so there probably isn’t time for extensive field work or archival research. It must be a fact-finding question, not an ethical or interpretive question at this stage. It must be a question to which you do not currently know the answer, but which has high stakes for your field. Take your time on this step, consulting with faculty or advanced students and browsing around in publications in your field.
3. Okay, once you’ve drafted a solid Research Question, it’s time to start the initial research. See if there is a recent “state of the field” article, bibliography, or some other resource that covers what’s being published right now in your area. If you don’t readily find such a thing, ask the professor to recommend one. The more focused this can be on works that potentially answer your Research Question, the better. Even just reading through the titles of the most recent articles and books in your field can give you a sense of what’s being done now and what the current concerns are.
4. For studies involving literature and other print-heavy fields (English, Theatre, History, Religion, American Studies, Music, etc.) it’s a good idea to find the best, most recent bibliography of your target authors’ works and to find out which are the official editions of these authors’ works. You can usually discover this by looking in the latest issues of the top journal(s) in this field. If you don’t readily find out, ask the professor which ones are currently the most acceptable. It would be a shame to write your whole Thomas Malory paper, say, using Vinaver only to find out that your target journal—or worse yet, your professor!—favors Field. Horrors.
5. Now you might want to compile a list of the relevant primary sources in chronological order. Hopefully this already exists, in the form of a handy bibliography. But if not, make one yourself—then narrow it down. There’s no way you’re going to read all that in the next few weeks. No, seriously. You won’t.
6. Similarly, compile a list of the relevant secondary sources, but in reverse chronological order. While you’re at it, do a quick check to find out what your professor has written (if they haven’t already assigned their Complete Works to you in their seminar. Yup. It happens). Do they have anything relevant on the subject? If so, be sure to read it and cite it if possible. Anyway, back to this reverse chronological order thing. See, the idea is that you’ll want to have a general sense of both what’s hot in your field and also what the classic, game-changing, most-cited academic works are. If you start reading (skimming, really, or maybe even just reading abstracts) with the newest stuff, you’ll accomplish that first goal of seeing what’s hot right away, and pretty soon you’ll start seeing certain Names repeated over and over. Those are the Founding Folks of your field; get their works. Have a glance inside. Cite them a teeny bit. That’s cocktail party cred right there.
7. Take a breath. What have you learned? Do you get a sense of the most pressing concerns in your field right now? Do you need to revise your Research Question at this point? Take a break. Let it all settle for a while. Then come back and cut your lists in half. For real. You still won’t read all of that, so cut out whatever is not absolutely necessary, and then some of what’s left. Now acquire the rest of it. Check books out of the library, order things via ILL, download or print articles, and that sort of thing. Somewhere in this initial researching phase, make an appointment with your subject-area’s liaison librarian to get assistance with locating anything you’ve missed or with filling in gaps.
8. As you work on this initial research process, put everything in a Zotero folder. Researching, writing, and citing are one integrated activity, so always keep track of sources and citations as you go.

TL;DR: Read, read, read! Come up with a research question, rather than a research topic; the narrower, the better. Know the foundational texts related to your question. Check out the bibliography of related article from a journal that you really like. Compile a list of primary texts you need, then narrow to the essentials. Do the same with secondary texts, but prioritize by the most recent scholarship. Do preliminary searches and skims, then revise your lists again. Keep track of everything in a Zotero folder.

Tune in next week when we talk about actually beginning to write!