You need to learn the habit of working with sources, interpreting evidence, evaluating data, collecting and synthesizing information. This is how you become a researcher. (Memering p. xii)
Use your journal as a place to record your thoughts and ideas. Take notes on what you are reading. A journal is an excellent place to write on a regular basis. To develop and maintain your writing skills, you need to write regularly. You need to learn how to think through writing. By talking to yourself in your journal you can develop ideas and find new ideas. You can also pick out the weak points of earlier ideas. "Think of reading as a dialogue between you and the authors. Like an intelligent participant in a dialogue, you need to respond, agree or disagree, suggest additional examples, point out contradictions or exaggerations, pursue side issues and digressions." (Memering p. 3)
Doing research is seldom a straight line. You will find yourself going back and rethinking what you have written even in the later stages of your research.
1. Understand Your Task
Be sure you know what is required of you in writing a thesis. Look at previous theses. Ask your advisor. Keep the requirements in front of you as you work.
2. Understand Your Subject. If you are interested in a general subject area, start investigating the area for more specific sub-topics early in your career as a graduate student. Make a list of interests you have and areas you might like to research.
3. Understand Your Audience. You thesis is written for your advisor and other readers as well as the academic commuity at large. You will probably be expected to use academic style language.
Read the two following short paragraphs on the same topic and decide which is casual writing and which is academic writing.
Culture Shock Paragraph I
When I first went to Zambia to teach school, I found many cultural differences from Canada. One I discovered a few days after I arrived. I was invited to a wedding in a nearby village and went with several teachers from the high school I was teaching at. While at the wedding we were fed lunch. My parents had always taught me to eat everything on my plate, so I cleaned by plate carefully. To my surprise, someone took my empty plate, and returned with it full of food. I had a rather shocked look on my face and one of my colleagues laughed and explained that in Zambia when you are full, you leave a small amount of food on your plate. If you eat everything they think you are still hungry and will refill your plate.
Culture Shock Paragraph II
Scholars have described various facets of culture shock. Furnham and Bochner (1982) have noted that unfamiliarity with any or all aspects of a new society (physical, technololgical, climatic, political, legal, educational, linguistic and socio-cultural) may contribute to "culture shock", but have argued that the most fundamental difficulties experienced by cross-cultural travellers occur in social situations, episodes and transactions. For example, travellers to Zambia may discover that if they eat all the food on their plate at a social function, that the plate is promptly refilled. The message of an empty plate being that the person is not yet satisfied. The accepted procedure for indicating one is satiated being to leave a small amount of food on one's plate.
4. Understand Your Voice.
Decide how subjective or objective (distant or academic) you wish to sound. Much recent academic writing is less formal than it once was; however, it is important to maintain consistency in your voice.
Once you have a general research topic, begin looking for your specific research question. Read books, magazines, and newspaper articles to help you focus your ideas. As you read about your subject it becomes easier to understand what interests you and what area of research you can explore. As you read:
On the basis of your reading, develop your thesis statement. A thesis has two parts: a subject and a question about it. Your thesis should be an arguable topic, i.e., a statement about which reasonable people could disagree. Be sure to phrase your thesis in such a way that you can answer the question in the time and space you have available.
Try to make your question as small as possible. Even if you start out with a simple question, as you progress in your research, you will find it becomes more and more complicated.
You may start with a general topic such as English Education in Japan or Cross-cultural Communication, but you will have to narrow your topic to a much more specific and less ambiguous subject.
a. Research requires a small subject done in great depth, not an overview of a large topic.
b. Look at the card catalogue to see how your topic is divided into more specific topics.
(p.15 Memering)
Is your research worthwhile to you and to the others who will be reading it? You will be spending a lot of time on your research so try to find something useful or interesting to yourself and others.
If you cannot find any material on your subject, it is not researchable. Do you have the material available in libraries? If you plan to do an experiment, do you have access to the subjects of research?
You must describe:
You must show your advisor you are capable of doing the project.
When you write the background to a research proposal, your should survey the research which has been done before in your proposed area of research. You should also answer the question of why further research is needed.
You must describe what you plan to do. If you are going to do a survey, explain what you will survey. If you are going to do an experiment you must explain how you will analyze your results.
Procedure is sometimes called method and is sometimes included in the description section mentioned above. Often this section contains information about how you will collect material, what sources you will use such as, books, journals, government documents and the like.
All research involves problem solving. Be sure to cleary show any special problems you may meet in your research and explain how you will solve the problems or at least work around them.
If your research involves something special such as travel to a different place or foreign country to gather materials, include a summary of what you plan to do in this section. If there are no special requirements, this section may be omitted.
You must document any sources you have used in your proposal. The list of works cited also shows that you have done enough preliminary reading and that you seem to be heading in the right direction. Purdue University has a good page explaining the basics of the MLA style which is recommended by Tokoha.
Begin by building your bibliography, reading, and taking notes. As you read, you may wish to change the focus of your research question. You must read as many sources as possible within the limits of the time you have available. The more sources you have, the more confident people will be in the accuracy of your opinions.
Between data collection and the writing of your thesis is data analysis. You need to go through all the material you have collected, sort it, and begin to write your report. You must weigh the evidence you have, reason about the material you have collected, and then reach a conclusion.
Your task as writer is to show the reader what you feel the data probably mean. You should write carefully to convince your readers that your conclusions are probable.
Writing is cyclical so it is not wise or necessary to collect all your data before beginning to write. As you write you will find areas in your data that need more research or at least clarification. This may force you back into one of the earlier cycles.
Re-read your thesis for accuracy, clarity, and economy (or a lack thereof). After much revision, discussion with your advisor, and rewriting you will be finished.
References: Memering, Dean. The Prentice Hall Guide to Research Writing. 2nd Ed.Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989.