Preface

While the Preface is mostly meant for instructors who use The Curious Researcher, I think it’s a useful thing for students to read as well. In addition to the usual stuff about how to use the book, the Preface establishes a central theme: the text’s focus on inquiry. I argue that conventional instruction in the research paper does a pretty bad job of teaching students what it really means to engage in academic inquiry, and that an introduction to research ought to involve questions as well as answers, and doubt as well as certainty. The book encourages essaying as a mode of inquiry. What do I mean by that? The Introduction offers a fuller explanation, but briefly, the kind of research writing that The Curious Researcher promotes usually begins with the writer’s curiosity about some aspect of her world, and the writing is driven by the questions that arise as she thinks and learns more about her topic.

The Preface also highlights a few new things in the fourth edition of The Curious Researcher. You might be particularly interested to know that:

• In addition to completely updated links for Web sites that are useful for student researchers, I’ve expanded treatment of two key concerns that have grown along with use of the Web: plagiarism, and evaluating sources.

• There is completely new content on reading strategies for researchers. The new edition of The Curious Researcher challenges students to reflect on how they approach reading different kinds of source texts and how they might read them more efficiently and with greater understanding.

• The popular library and Internet exercises should be even more effective because they’re now organized under two new categories—how to gain a “working knowledge” of a topic and how to develop a “deep knowledge.” Each involves using both library and Internet sources.

• The 4th edition offers more alternatives for methods of notetaking beyond the double-entry journal, including a new approach called “narrative note taking.”

Introduction: Rethinking the Research Paper

As the title implies, this chapter is about reexamining what you thought you knew about writing research papers for school. Most of us wrote term papers in high school, so we come to the assignment with quite a few assumptions about what it means to do research and to write about it. Most of the time, these assumptions aren’t discussed in class, and that’s too bad because I’ve found that beliefs about doing academic research may be way off the mark. Exercise 1 will get you started thinking about your own assumptions.

The Introduction also features a research essay that I wrote called “The Bothersome Beauty of Pigeons,” a look at how hard it is to deal with “pests” in the natural world that don’t fit our idea of completely bad things that ought to be eliminated. I hope that this essay both challenges your ideas about what a “research paper” is supposed to be and might inspire you to think about research you’d like to do.

More specifically, this chapter has the following aims:

• Introduce the idea that learning often involves "unlearning," particularly when we think we already know something about a subject.
• Establish the obvious: a lot of people simply hate writing research papers. We might as well admit that, and then consider why this is and what we can do about it.
• Make a key distinction between two kinds of researched genres—the "research report" and the research essay—and explain that in one the writer often has less control over his purpose than in the other.
• Help you understand why some academic writing seems so boring.
• Introduce a key focus of the book: the four "habits of mind" that tend to drive academic inquiry.

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