|
|
|
|
This may be one of the most important chapters in the book, not only because it finds you in the middle of the research process—perhaps the busiest most demanding stage—but also because it is the moment when you are challenged to deal with an avalanche (or alarming trickle) of information. The central purpose of the chapter is to prepare you for this moment. One way I hope to do this is by introducing you to "dialectical thinking." This is an impressive phrase that likely describes something you’ve already practiced, although you may not know it. Dialectal thinking is a movement of thought between what you read and what you think about it, between what you observe and your ideas about it, between generating information and judging its value. We all engage in this kind of thinking whenever we encounter something we want to understand. It is also something you may have practiced as you generated some freewriting in your journal and then tried to make use of it in a draft. The key is that dialectical thinking is a continuous movement back and forth between these two seemingly contrary perspectives. What does this have to do with the middle of the research process? It is the method of thought that is most likely to help make sense of the information you’re gathering and prepare you to use what you discover in your paper. This chapter introduces several methods of notetaking that encourage dialectical thinking, including something called the "double-entry journal" or "dialogue" journal that is designed to encourage dialectical thinking. The first part of Chapter 3 argues that such notetaking in the middle of the research process may seem time-consuming, but is extremely important. Other objectives in "The Third Week" include the following:
|