Tutorial 1

Audience & purpose

Who am I writing to and what do I want to achieve?

! How to design the research?

Academic writing is not pompous, long-winded, designed to confuse, and rambling. Don’t use
big words to impress; don’t use three words where one word…

Academic writing is precise, concise, meticulous, peer-reviewed, and augmented.

Problem statement:

How are we going to write academic paper?

Learning goals:

1. What is academic paper?

2. What are different methods proposed?
And how do you decide on an appropriate methodology?
3. How to narrow down wide range of it?
4. What are the necessary component? (research questions, literature review)
How to order these? How do we start? How to research literature?

An academic paper is not a social commentary, an opinion or a "blog". An academic paper

begins with a thesis - the writer of the academic paper aims to persuade readers of an idea or
solution to a problem based on EVIDENCE - not personal opinion.

Why having research questions is important?

-Guide my research
-Create a clear argument
-Plan my ideas
-Make a search strategy

Research question:

 Unique question (not been discuss before or different from my classmates)

 Focus to be interesting; broad to find enough informationnot too narrow nor too broad
 I should be interested in the topic
 Not too easy to answer, not too difficult to answer
 I can access a suitable amount of quality research materials researchable
 Analytical rather than descriptive

Question should be specific and precise; specific

should be interesting also important to others; interesting
can be answeredanswerable

Develop the research questions- Step by step:

-Choose topic
-Do some background research
-Write down possible questions: why, who, when, how…
-Choose one or two questions to focus on
-Evaluate the questions I have created
-Assign limits to what I will covernarrow
-! A research topic may be difficult to research, if it’s too locally confined, recent, broadly, and
interdisciplinary

Discipline broad topicnarrowed topicfocus topic research question

Another way- How to create research question

-Determine the requirement
-Choose a topic
-Conduct preliminary research
-Narrow down the topic
-Write the question

Wh- question >> Yes/ No question (are/is/do/does)

Try to answer an emergency question, instead of the question that has already been asked and
answered over again and again

Three steps to write a good research question:

-Articulate my topic (what do I know? What aspects of the topic most interest me?)
-Consider what I don’t know about the topic (What do I need to research?)
-Start drafting my research question (What information I need to answer it?)

Don’t use value words, such as “good” or “bad”

 To narrow the questionset limits by focusing on a particular population, time period,

location, etc.

To answer any research questions, I first need to formulate it in such a way that it can be tested
scientifically.
evidence, hypothesis, statistician (test hypothesis with numeric data)
consider detail and be specific to make research question plausible and testable
=> Writing out the research question in the form of a testable hypothesis is one of the first key
steps in doing research. It helps to analyze data in the next step.

 As you read the literature and gain a greater understanding about your research problem,
you will rework your research question until you are able to focus more specifically on what
you want to explore and learn about during the formal research process.

Some kinds of questions should try to avoid:

1. The Deceptively Simple Question (看似簡單的問題)
A question that demands a simple answer to a complex question.
Ex: When did women achieve equality?
2. The Fictional Question
Ex: If Hitler had been accepted to art school, would World War II have happened?
3. The Stacked Question or The Embedded Assumption
Ex: Why did the Carter presidency fail?
4. The Semantic Question
A question that hinges on the definition of terms.
Ex: Are all radical revolutions violent?
5. The Impossible-to-Answer Question
Ex: Was World War I inevitable?
6. The Opinion or Ethical Question
Ex: Was Truman wrong to authorize the use of the atomic bomb?
7. The Anachronistic Question
Ex: How good was ancient Athens’ record on civil rights?

Self-test
1. Does my question allow for many possible answers? Is it flexible and open-ended?
2. Is it testable? Do I know what kind of evidence would allow an answer?
3. Can I break big “why” questions into empirically resolvable pieces?
4. Is the question clear and precise? Do I use vocabulary that is vague or needs definition?
5. Have I made the premises explicit?
6. Is it of a scale suitable to the length of the assignment?
7. Can I explain why the answer matters?

I want to take:
-research question should be unique but not that recent, I need to have my own perspective, at
least different from my classmates.
-doing background research before forming a research question (maybe I would find other
topics that I’m interested in)
-research question should be specific (it’s not that easy)

The question I have:

How can I start and structure? Some people say it’s easier to write the body paragraph then
write the introduction.

More I read, more I know what questions have already been answered.

No quantitative (no number), usually qualitative research

Keep everything simple, don’t use long sentence if I don’t have to