In This Chapter
One of the most important genres you will need to master as a college writer is the Research Essay. Research-based essay projects are required for all academic disciplines, and understanding the expectations and requirements for college-level research-based essays is essential for success at the college level. The second half of our semester will specifically focus on the process and skills necessary to complete the college-level research essay.
Why Write Research Essays?
As you’ve already seen, there are some basic differences between the writing you did in high school and the writing you will be required to do in college. These differences are all related to the rhetorical situation of the college classroom. Research-based writing at the college level differs from the research-based writing you might have done in high school in one essential way:
In high school, you wrote to demonstrate an understanding of facts or a mastery of a topic.
In college, you will write to demonstrate your critical thinking and analysis about a topic or subject.
Understanding this main difference is essential to understanding the expectations of college-level research essays. If your research in previous classes consisted of using Google or Google Scholar or simply finding a few key words or phrases that support what you already believed about the topic, the research-based writing you do in college will require something very different. When you’re taking courses from professors who are highly-trained experts in their fields, it’s much more difficult to fake your own knowledge of the topic. You will not simply report on the information you discovered.
Instead, the research-based writing that you do in college needs to come from deep knowledge about the topic and demonstrate your own voice and thinking as you enter the conversation.
Information Is Everywhere
Today, technology has made information readily available. Anyone with an internet connection has almost instant access to Wikipedia, with its millions of entries, and Google with it’s seemingly unlimited search capabilities. Any question you have can be immediately answered with a series of short searches on your smart phone.
In high school, you might have been asked to simply find information about a topic or subject. You then reported back on what you found. Hopefully, your teachers talked about how to evaluate sources for reliability. Maybe they even talked about finding multiple sources that agreed, so you could be sure that the information you presented was correct. In college, evaluating, analyzing, and critiquing the evidence you use to support your thesis becomes one of the central skills and requirements of the research essay.
You might be asking why this is necessary if college-level writing requires library sources? Aren’t library sources all relevant and reliable?
In short, yes. But as you proceed through your college career, you’ll begin to see how different subjects have different requ