Describing and Explaining a Scholarly Conversation

Introduction

Entering into a conversation of any kind can be tricky if you are new to a group of people, topic, or even the tone of the conversation. If you don’t pause and listen to what people are saying for a moment before speaking, you can repeat something someone else has said, come across as speaking in bad faith, or strike up the wrong tone entirely. The same is true for engaging with a conversation within an academic discipline or topic of scholarship. To become a member of their scholarly community and enter the conversation, you may need to spend some time catching up on what people have said before you. While deciding when you have listened or read enough is going vary from topic to topic and assignment to assignment, the research process utilizes many concrete techniques and practices that can help you reach those goals. In this section of readings, you will read about some of those techniques and how they can serve you as a researcher and writer.

Questions and Arguments

Research is often described as a linear process, but it is often anything but. While there are recognizable phases and strategies, in extended research projects you can often find yourself doing certain tasks repeatedly, adjusting the scope of your research, changing your terms, or even discovering a related but functionally new topic that interests you more. In many ways, this makes sense because what we know can teach us what to ask. If you learn a lot about particle physics, for example, you begin to see what we don’t know and what would merit further study. “Listening” to the conversation doesn’t just teach you more about what to say, but also about how to listen even better.

Often our understanding of a topic starts broad and digs down into a particular group of ideas or applications, which is how some broad disciplines like engineering have vastly different subfields that deal with aerodynamics, construction, efficiency, computer software and hardware, chemicals, and many other areas. Our understanding of how manipulate and craft the world around us may have begun with general concerns, but the more we learned about the world, the more specific our questions have become. A computer engineer may spend the majority of their time examining how sound signals are processed and transmitted and may never even examine the particular chemical makeup of a pesticide that targets certain species but is virtually harmless to others, and yet both of those concerns fall under the umbrella of engineering. Similarly a historian who studies ancient Persia may never spend meaningful time considering the cultural impact of TikTok and other social media apps, but both topic could be considered to be part of the humanities or even the social sciences. In a similar way, your understanding of a concept may start off very broad, and so your initial questions about that topic may start equally broad, but as you learn more and gain a deeper understanding of a topic, your questions will change and become far more specific. Your questions will evolve from learning the definitions of terms and concepts to applying those terms to situations to test them out. So while early on in your research, you may have broad questions, if you allow these questions to evolve and change as you learn more and more about a topic, you will find your ability to research the topic improve as you go.

Similarly, when you are looking for a stance or argument to make on a topic for an assignment, you may find this stance evolve as you learn more about a topic. A topic that had initially seemed extremely simple to you at first may grow more and more complex as you delve into the research, which will likely make your argument more specific and granular. Or, alternatively, a topic which seemed hopelessly complicated may become much simpler to you as the true point of controversy becomes clear in the midst of a large and messy conversation. Or your argument may change in a dozen other ways. Regardless, allowing your stance to change along with your questions will not only help you better understand your topic, it will also help you better explain your perspective.

While research can be a tedious process, the goal is not simply to prove you deserve to speak about a topic, but to understand your topic as clearly as you can. By cultivating a deep understanding of a topic, you are better equipped to describe and demonstrate your stance on that topic. If someone is explaining why a business regulation should be stronger but they can’t clearly explain the details of the regulation, it is more difficult to follow the point they are making even if it is a good one. They may be completely right, but having as deep a knowledge about the regulations surrounding this business will help them select the best information to share and focus on the most important points of the conversation. While research can build your credibility as a writer, its greatest power is in how it builds your ability to write in the first place.

Engaging with research can do a lot of things for us as writers, learners, and people. Not only does it allow us to better understand the world around us, it also helps us to better position ourselves within that world and decide what we want to do about it. Not every research project may change your mind in a deep way, but every research project is an opportunity to better understand the world and yourself as a part of that world, and the readings that follow should help provide you with tools to do just that.