Tag: research

Prospectus Planning Questions

One of the most difficult things about writing your prospectus is that there isn’t a clear template for what you’re expected to produce. Some of this is for good reason: different fields/sub-fields handle proposed work differently, expect different levels of engagement with prior scholarship and theory, and demand varying levels of justification of your questions…Continue Reading Prospectus Planning Questions

Finding Secondary Sources Online

The internet will surely be the end of us all, but while it’s around you should get good at using it for research. If you ever have trouble finding resources for your papers (navigating results on the library website, getting too much garbage, not finding enough sources, figuring out whether a source is reliable or…Continue Reading Finding Secondary Sources Online

Introductions and Literature Reviews

Writing literature reviews is one of the trickiest things you’ll have to do in graduate school.  It is even more tricky because a lot of professors will want you to do things that are pedagogically valuable but so tailored to the specific class they are teaching that it can be hard to generalize the lessons…Continue Reading Introductions and Literature Reviews

APA 7th Edition General Information and Tips

Professors, like many of us, are not always direct when expressing their wants. Nowhere is this more true than when a professor tells you that your paper should adhere to APA formatting/style guidelines. “My professor wants my paper to be in APA style…” When your professor says that your paper has to adhere to APA…Continue Reading APA 7th Edition General Information and Tips

Academic Journals 1/x: How Things Work

The process of submitting to and hopefully being published in an academic journal can be opaque. Every journal has it’s own rules; different editors communicate (or don’t) differently; and the advice that you receive from different academic advisors might be vague or conflicting. If you’ve been given some hard and fast rules for how-to and…Continue Reading Academic Journals 1/x: How Things Work

Editing Techniques for Graduate Writing: AXES Highlighting

If the hardest thing about writing is starting, then editing is probably a close second. YOU wrote the thing — if you could have written it differently, you would have, right? Editing is especially challenging if you approach it in the same way that you approach writing a first draft. The way that a good…Continue Reading Editing Techniques for Graduate Writing: AXES Highlighting

Outlining Your Prospectus

Your dissertation committee will be in charge of the specific guidelines of your proposal (length, format, expected scope, etc.). That being said, all effective proposals do at least four things: Contextualize and ask an answerable question; identify what existing scholarship has and has not done to address that question; explain how the researcher will answer…Continue Reading Outlining Your Prospectus

Introductions Done Three Ways

Some professors will tell you that the introduction should be the last thing that you write.  Some will tell you that it should be the first.  Both strategies probably have merits, but what’s most important is keeping in mind the purpose of your introduction.  Your introduction should “introduce” your paper, sure, but what does that…Continue Reading Introductions Done Three Ways

Developing Research Questions

Developing a research question, like every other aspect of a research project—working with sources, the interpretation of data, the writing, the editing—takes work, and is a skill that you can practice, refine, and personalize.  Here’s a short primer on how to come up with a workable research question, references included. Whether you’re just beginning, or…Continue Reading Developing Research Questions