Research Paper Writing: Preliminary Reading

Once you've selected a general topic like "The Battle of the Alamo" or "The Olympics," you need to work toward a more narrowed subject and gradually toward a precise assertion. Often you will have selected a topic you're interested in but are not familiar with, so you can't move toward a narrowed subject without at least some preliminary reading. Sometimes you won't have a final thesis until you've finished your research and are well into writing the early drafts of your paper. But usually you can come up with a solid "working" thesis - one that seems to be based on correct assumptions and for which material appears to be available - after checking a few of the handiest sources. You don't need to know a great deal about using the library or recording research information at this stage. If you have these skills already, you can use them, but there's no problem now if you don't.

All you need to know for the moment is how to find encyclopedias and a little about how to use the card catalog. Most encyclopedias are reliable and will do very well for prelimin- ary reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Encyclopedia Americana are two of the most respected, and one or both are available in most college libraries. An article in an encyclopedia seldom will be enough to allow you to refine your thesis fully, but it can give you very quickly the basic facts about your topic and perhaps some of the impor- tant questions about it. Sometimes you can find other sources listed at the end of the article. If, after reading the encyclopedia article, you still think your topic is promising, write down the items in this list of references (or use a copying machine if it's lengthy) and consult some of these sources.

Usually it's a good idea to check the books in a list of references first because they're more likely to contain basic informa- tion, whereas articles in journals tend to be very specialized. After you have reviewed several encyclopedia articles, the next step is to consult the card catalog to check for books on your topic. Try such headings as "Olympics" or "Alamo." If headings such as these aren't the right ones for your library, you usually can find cross-reference cards there to direct you to the right ones. Copy down the complete call numbers, titles, and authors, and then go to the stacks and skim the books. At this point you should know whether your topic is workable. If there aren't any good books listed in the card catalog or if your library doesn't have any of the sources listed in an encyclopedia's list of refer ences, you may wish to change your topic to one for which sources are more accessible.

For a contemporary topic, very few books may have been written, so you'd also want to check for the availability of articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers before deciding to switch (the next chapter tells you how to go about looking for these sources). But whether you want to work with books or articles in periodicals, the point is still the same: You need to be sure sources are within your reach before you spend too much time with a topic. Don't be reluctant to change now. Compared to the effort for thorough research, at this point you will have invested relatively little time in a topic. Better to change now than to admit days later that you simply do not have the basis for a solid research paper.

By the time you've completed your preliminary reading, you will have narrowed the subject of your paper and probably will have some idea about a stand on it. At this point you should try to write a working thesis statement. The "subject [is, was, should be, etc.] assertion" form we discussed at the beginning of the chapter is fine for a start. And don't be greatly concerned at this point if the assertion is imprecise. As you proceed with your research, you should continually refine this working thesis. Don't do this haphazardly; consciously make yourself pause occasionally to reconsider your working thesis statement, checking it for a narrowed subject and a precisely worded assertion.

One important point, though, is not to feel psychologically obligated to defend your opening position. You develop a working thesis to guide your research, and the tentative statement is based on what seems to be correct at the time. During preliminary reading and research most of us develop an opinion about our topic; it's almost impossible for us to avoid doing so. The working thesis uses that opinion to help set the scope of research. Yet because the working thesis is only tentative, we can stay intellectually honest so that the final thesis will represent an intelligent position based on the solid support we discover bit by bit during research.