Research Essays: Overview
The further you go in college, the more research you will do, and the more research essays you will write. Being able to collect and synthesize research into our own writing are among the most important skills we learn in college. Finding and using research sources are skills that you will use throughout your professional and personal lives. For this reason, it’s important that you learn early in college to successfully compose an academic research essay.
Composing a complex and thoroughly researched essay provides opportunities for you to develop your critical thinking skills. No research essay can be successful without careful consideration of how evidence fits together into a cohesive whole. Writing an effective research essay also enhances our credibility as writers and communicators. Once you’re able to connect the research dots in order to make logical points about some larger significance, then you are better equipped to understand the world around you as well as help others understand the world around them, too.
Academic research essays are formal essays that engage with complex questions, research, and issues. When you write a research essay, you will go beyond just talking about a topic and transition to making informed claims about a topic. Readers expect that an academic research essays will have a clear focus, address a significant issue, include insightful research evidence, and explore the implications of the issue being addressed.
Before you begin writing a research essay, however, you need to conduct some research. The below chapters will help you better understand and navigate the research process:
Key Features
A Singular Focus and Clear Perspective
Many writers enter college believing that broad, generalized topics are easier to research and write about: this could not be farther from the truth. Choosing a broad topic gives you, as well as your reader, no clear direction. You will find yourself aimlessly sifting through thousands of search results, struggling to pull disparate sources together into a logically organized essay. These challenges can be avoided by deciding on a singular focus and clear perspective early in the process.
Developing a Singular Focus and Clear Perspective
Imagine you are interested in animal conservation. That’s a good start, but far too broad of a topic for a research essay. From this initial interest, you might:
- Identify a specific type of animal. Let’s go with lions.
- Identify a specific type of lion. Let’s choose African lions.
At this point, you have a singular focus: African lions. But you’re not done. African lions is still too broad for a research topic. You need a clear perspective. From here, you might:
- Identify a serious threat to the lions. Let’s go with illegal hunting.
- Develop a perspective on the illegal hunting of African lions. Let’s try the impact of illegal hunting on African lion populations.
Now you would have a topic with singular focus and clear perspective that is researchable and will be much easier to organize into an effective essay.
As you develop your own research essay topic, use the above walkthrough to help develop a singular focus and clear perspective.
Formal Writing Style
While some of the writing you do in college will be more informal, such as personal essays or online discussions, academic research essays require us to adopt a formal writing style as we engage with complex questions, research, and issues. If you write your research essay the way you write text messages or how you chat with your friends, your readers will find your essay to be much less credible. In order to be taken seriously, you want your writing to come off as professional and authoritative rather than casual and underdeveloped.
Informative Tone and Objective Stance
While you will write argumentatively at various times throughout your college career, your purpose when writing an academic research essay is typically to inform, and this means that your stance should be objective. Since your goal is to inform, you will need to make clear claims about why readers need to know this information. As you write a research essay, you may provide new information on a known subject, provide historical context, clear up misconceptions, introduce the audience to something unknown, or develop a profile of a person, place, or object. Even though you should remain objective, research essays are usually written for a specific audience and purpose, so it’s your job to define the purpose and decide what kinds of information your audience needs and how best to present that information.
Credible Evidence That Suits Your Purpose
Without taking the necessary time to seek out and collect credible evidence about your topic, your research essay is unlikely to successfully inform readers. Academic research essays should rely almost exclusively on evidence in each section and paragraph, and the credibility and relevance of that evidence should be made clear to your reader. It’s your job to find not just any evidence related to your topic, but the evidence that suits your purpose for your audience. Your evidence, the information you use to support your main points, will most likely include a mix of sources from the college’s library collection as well as credible materials from the internet. Also keep in mind that you will, and should, find many more sources during your research process than you ultimately use in your essay. The first sources we find are rarely the best sources to use. It’s your job to identify which sources are are most suited for your topic and purpose.
A Logical Structure
Research essays need to be logically organized with a clear structure that creates connections between the different parts of your essay. When organizing a research essay, you will need to make careful rhetorical choices about the order in which you introduce ideas, define key terms, provide background information, and address key issues for your audience. Readers expect that research essays will guide them through the information logically, and your structure will be how you ensure that readers understand how topics and subtopics relate to your main focus.
Citations
As we write research essays, it’s vital that we use a detailed citation process in order to demonstrate to our readers where our supporting evidence comes from and why it’s credible. This process will involve citations at the end of your essay, but also, and just as importantly, in-text citations throughout your essay. Using in-text citations and signal phrases is necessary to successfully guide readers through the information you have collected in your essay. Without in-text citations, readers are completely lost as to where the information came from, why it’s credible, and how it connects to the main topic.
Drafting Checklists
These questions should help guide you through the stages of drafting your research essay.
Prewriting
- What will you choose as your main topic?
- How will you develop a singular focus and clear perspective on your topic?
- What are some subtopics or related ideas you might need to learn more about during your research?
- Who is your intended audience?
- In other words, who do you want to share this information with? And why should they care about your research?
- What background information about your topic might your audience need?
- Are there key terms or concepts you will need to define or describe?
- What kinds of evidence do you need to find?
- Where should try to find this evidence?
- Why should your audience care about this evidence?
- After you’ve collected some research, which sources are ultimately necessary for your essay?
- Why those sources and not others?
- How will you use those sources in your essay?
- How might you structure your research essay?
- What subtopics might you cover throughout your essay?
- How might your start your essay?
- How might you end your essay?
Writing and Revising
- Is your focus and perspective on your topic made clear early in your essay?
- Does your title or intro paragraph effectively establish your focus and perspective?
- Have you effectively structured your essay in a logical way that suits your topic and purpose?
- Have you clearly made connections between your topic and subtopics?
- Have you presented your research in the best way to guide readers through the information?
- Does your conclusion offer readers intriguing final takeaways to consider?
- Would your readers be confused at any point?
- Have you written your essay with a formal tone and style?
- Would readers find your tone and style to be professional and authoritative? Or too casual and informal?
- Have you avoided using any slang or other informal language that would detract from your credibility?
- Have you written your essay from an objective stance that avoids using personal opinions or arguing a position?
- Have you used credible evidence that suits your purpose?
- Have you created correct works cited entries for all your sources?
- Have you used signal phrases and in-text citations to integrate sources into your essay?
- Would readers question the credibility or relevance of any of your sources?
Sources Used to Create this Chapter
Parts of this chapter were remixed from:
- First-Year Composition: Writing as Inquiry and Argumentation, by Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Kathy Quesenbury, which was published under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
