Jennifer Clary-Lemon ● Derek Mueller ● Kate Pantelides

TRY THIS
Research Methods for Writers
 TRY THIS
RESEARCH METHODS FOR WRITERS
Practices & Possibilities
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 TRY THIS
RESEARCH METHODS FOR WRITERS

Jennifer Clary-Lemon
University of Waterloo

Derek Mueller
Virginia Tech

Kate Pantelides
Middle Tennessee State University

WAC Clearinghouse
wac.colostate.edu
Fort Collins, Colorado

University Press of Colorado

upcolorado.com
Louisville, Colorado
The WAC Clearinghouse, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523
University Press of Colorado, Louisville, Colorado 80027
© 2022 by Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelides. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
ISBN 978-1-64215-144-2 (PDF) | 978-1-64215-145-9 (ePub) | 978-1-64642-312-5 (pbk.)
DOI 10.37514/PRA-B.2022.1442
Produced in the United States of America
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Names: Clary-Lemon, Jennifer, author. | Mueller, Derek N., 1974- author. | Pantelides, Kate, 1981- author.
Title: Try this : research methods for writers / Jennifer Clary-Lemon, University of Waterloo ; Derek Mueller, Virginia Tech ; Kate
Pantelides, Middle Tennessee State University.
Description: Fort Collins, Colorado : The WAC Clearinghouse ; Louisville, Colorado : University Press of Colorado, [2022] | Series:
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Identifiers: LCCN 2021060203 (print) | LCCN 2021060204 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646423125 (paperback) | ISBN 9781642151442 (pdf) |
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Subjects: LCSH: English language--Rhetoric--Research--Methodology. | English language--Rhetoric--Problems, exercises, etc. |
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iv
Contents
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Chapter 1. What are Research Methods? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Uncertainty and Curiosity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Rhetorical Foundations of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Research Example: Student Writing Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Research Example: Access to Clean Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Research Across the Disciplines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Using Research Methods Ethically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Developing a Research Proposal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Focus on Delivery: Writing a Research Proposal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Chapter 2. Making Research Ethical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Ethical Approaches to Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Ethos is Collective and Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Ethics and Secondary Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Establishing Ethos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Evaluating Texts and Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Learning Citation Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Ethics and Primary Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Focus on Delivery: Composing a Participation Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Chapter 3. Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
The Power of Worknets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Phase 1: Semantic Worknet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Phase 2: Bibliographic Worknet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Phase 3: Affinity Worknet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Phase 4: Choric Worknet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Branching Out—Taking Worknets Farther. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

v
 Contents

Using Worknets to Develop a Literature Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

Focus on Delivery: Writing a Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Chapter 4. Working With Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Discourse Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Content Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Rhetorical Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Genre Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Focus on Delivery: Developing a Coding Scheme. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Chapter 5. Working with People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Surveys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Interviews. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Putting It All Together: Case Studies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Focus on Delivery: Writing a Research Memo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Chapter 6. Working with Places and Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Methods Can Be Material. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Archival Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Site-Based Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Places and Things Converge: Mapmaking as a Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Focus on Delivery: Curating a Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Chapter 7. Working with Visuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Photographs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Working with More Visuals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
Looking Again at Working with Visuals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Focus on Delivery: The Photo Essay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Chapter 8. Research and the Rhetorical Forms It Takes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
The Rhetorical Forms Research Takes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Focus on Delivery: Developing a Research Poster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

vi
Preface
Writing is often heralded as one of the most—if not the most—important
skills one can hone in higher education. But we—three teacher-scholars in
Writing Studies—argue that it’s not just writing that matters. Composition is
about thinking alongside others, about problem-solving, about experimenta-
tion, about the excitement, curiosity, and unsureness that comes with seeking
questions to which we don’t know the answer. Composing asks us to approach
problems that are confusing, use tools we haven’t before, invent genres for new
rhetorical needs, and make texts using textual, audio, visual, and digital tools.
Composition is about knowledge-making, not just writing about knowledge.
This text invites students and faculty to approach composing at all levels with
an openness and a willingness to be wrong and/or to discover something new
and exciting.
There seems to be much agreement that writing also means researching.
Whenever we compose, we draw on both what we know and what we don’t
know to seek answers. Yet, sometimes we get stuck in a rut, circling around the
known, only using secondary textual research to answer our questions. In fact,
“the research paper” is a stalwart of most writing classes, but we suggest that
often, research papers don’t invite students and faculty to the exciting work of
not knowing, coming across new information, accessing primary data, and
selecting research methods beyond secondary-source research. Research proj-
ects should be primarily exploratory, sometimes conclusive, but more often
than not an opening-up of new unknowns, new spaces, and new questions.
Of course, we have to share findings at some point, but research is almost
always in progress, incomplete. In this text we offer multiple interdisciplinary
methods—often used in research in the field, but rarely drawn upon in under-
graduate courses—and suggest them for use at all levels. Such an approach to
composition has energized our own research and teaching.
In Try This: Research Methods for Writers, we ask students and faculty to
approach writing and researching differently than before. We invite you to rev-
el with us in the unknown, in liminality, in the excitement of primary research.
This shifts the approach from a standard model of knowledge delivery to a

vii
 Preface

pedagogy of knowledge-making, from a standard model of research writing as

solitary to an acknowledgement of research writing as collective, overlapping,
and distributed. We offer methods for working with words, with people, with
artifacts, with places, and with visuals. We start out with what we expect is
more familiar in English Studies—rhetorical analysis, secondary source use,
surveys, and interviews—and we move to methods that we think might be less
familiar, though just as useful and engaging—discourse analysis, map-mak-
ing, and using worknets for invention. Of course, you can work through the
book in whatever way matches your writing and research needs, but we do
encourage you to spend some time reading, thinking, and talking about the
nature of research (Chapter 1) and how to develop ethical research (Chapter 2)
as you begin your work together.
Each chapter is organized around methods to approach a particular kind of
primary data—texts, artifacts, places, and images. Because reading about writ-
ing and research is never enough, there are “Try This” invention projects pep-
pered throughout each chapter—these projects are designed to invite readers
to “try” the ideas we have introduced. Some of these projects are designed to
try during class time and take 5-15 minutes. Some require time and space and
will take hours to accomplish. Some are extensive and will take days to accom-
plish. Each research writing opportunity introduced in a “Try This” invention
project is designed to scaffold a research project. In addition to introducing
different methods and “Try This” research writing opportunities, chapters also
offer different culminating genres that allow research to circulate and to con-
nect meaningfully with audiences. For instance, in addition to textual genres,
we address scaffolding for digital research posters, data visualizations, and
short-form presentations.
Try This emphasizes the centrality of curiosity and discovery, invention,
and process to researching writers. We know that along the way, students
and instructors may find this a messy process! It is our hope that in engaging
with the richness that all research offers—whether working closely with texts,
talking with people, observing locations, generating and analyzing visuals,
and producing written texts—you will use this book as a guide through the
most challenging and rewarding moments of your research practices.

viii
 TRY THIS
RESEARCH METHODS FOR WRITERS
Chapter 1. What are
Research Methods?
Like all research projects, this text begins with questions: What is research?
Who does research? Why do research?
Research is the systematic asking of questions and congruent use of meth-
ods to learn answers to interesting, important questions. Whether or not your
research has been purposeful in the past, you do research all the time.
When you try to decide which deodorant is most effective by trying dif-
ferent brands, you’re doing research. When you ask friends for recommen-
dations about where to go to dinner, you’re doing research. When you exper-
iment with different routes to find the best way to get to work, you’re doing
research. And why? Because you want to know. Because you want to try to
know. But such information-gathering often takes particular routes, requires
specific tools, and is measured very differently. That’s where research meth-
ods come in. If you buy deodorant, you test it on yourself, a human subject.
If you ask friends for dinner reservations, you might send a group text that
acts as a survey, see who weighs in, and find out if their opinions match.
When you drive a particular route, you are engaging with a particular site
and measuring time. Each of these ways of using particular tools to answer a
question you have are different kinds of research methods.
Research methods are the tools, instruments, practices, processes—in-
sert whatever making metaphor you prefer—that allow you to answer ques-
tions of interest and contribute to a critical conversation, or a grouping of
recognized ideas about that interest. The critical conversation comes out
of our preliminary discovery about a particular question or set of ques-
tions—discovery work known as rhetorical invention, or a starting place
for thinking, researching, and writing. Just as an entrepreneur might invent
an as-seen-on-TV product that comes out of months of consumer obser-
vations and materials testing, writers invent their ideas through gathering
data in particular and diverse ways. That gathering place is the locus of re-
search methods, which we separate out in this book as working with sources
3
 4 Chapter 1

(Chapter 3), working with words (Chapter 4), working with people (Chap-
ter 5), working with places and things (Chapter 6), and working with visuals
(Chapter 7). Here, it’s important to note that the word “methods” is derived
from the Greek terms meta- (above, beyond) and -hodos (routes, pathways).

Try This: Preview Your Awareness of Research Methods (15 minutes)

Think about the ways you’ve used different methods to solve problems and answer questions in your
life, then begin to apply those experiences to your understanding of research methods:
1. Make brief lists of ways/tools/methods you know of (or make up a method—be creative!) to
a. work with sources (the focus of Chapter 3 in this book). As a starting point, you might in-
clude different library databases you have accessed, or you might note various libraries you
have visited—what else?
b. work with words or texts (the focus of Chapter 4 in this book). As a starting point, you might
include different patterns you might look for in a text, like how many times a word appears or
how many times it appears in combination with a related word—what else?
c. work with people (the focus of Chapter 5 in this book). As a starting point, you might con-
sider that talking with folks individually is just one of the many ways of learning about them.
What are some other ways to learn about people, their behaviors, and their opinions?
d. work with places and things (the focus of Chapter 6). As a starting point, consider how the re-
sources you can access at your university and the spaces you inhabit in your daily life impact your
experience at the university. How might you systematically catalogue such observations?
e. work with visuals (the focus of Chapter 7 in this book). As a starting point, you might just
consider the visuals you have come across in the day so far. What were they? What did they
communicate? How did they impact you? How can visuals share information about research,
and how might they be the subject of a research project?
2. Test your invention work by turning to each chapter and scanning the methods we survey. Note,
in particular, where we have given name to a method you identified but did not have a term for,
where we have overlaps, where you identified an idea that we have not listed. The methods we
consider in this text are just a starting point, and you may find that you need to combine them to
get answers you’re interested in, you may need to look for methods outside the text, or you may
need to design a new method to accommodate your project.
What Are Research Methods 5

Considered with this in mind, research methods train researchers on the

available routes and pathways to generating new knowledge. Through writ-
ing and delivery (circulation), researchers and the texts they produce both
participate meaningfully in and also continue to shape research conversa-
tions (i.e., what is known and what is knowable). Our approach in this text
recognizes that you may have research questions about different areas of
interest, so it is important to have access to multiple methods that might
effectively lead you to a satisfying answer to your research question.
The thinking and decisions about research that we will ask you to make
in this text are complex. Often textbooks are intended to boil down ideas
to their simplest parts, but we are purposeful in offering complexity, both
because we know students are smart and can make sense of it, and because
interesting research is complex. You won’t initially end up with clean, clear,
easy answers, but that is by design. Real research is messy and requires re-
thinking. It often also includes periods of not-knowing, which can be un-
comfortable. Get ready to take risks, to experiment, and to not find the an-
swer on the first try.
The process the preceding “Try This” asks you to recall—that of iden-
tifying interesting questions, matching appropriate methods, considering
possible answers, and reflecting on this process to improve it in future itera-
tions—is the process of conducting research. In this text, we will encourage
you to tap into this curiosity, innovation, and reflection and deploy it sys-
tematically in your academic research writing projects. As students you have
We often spend a lot
the opportunity to contribute to our understanding of the world through of time on delivery—
your research. Instead of simply asking you to read what others have learned the product of our
through research (which is also very important!), in this text we ask you to reading, writing, and
jump in right away and participate in knowledge-making. We will alternate researching—but in
between invention—opportunities for you to try out informal writing and this text we ask you
activities related to your research question—and delivery*—opportunities to rebalance that
for you to develop specific writing products that get you closer to answering attention to inven-
your research question. We will also ask you to compose in multiple genres tion—starting points
(proposals, memos, literature reviews, maps, etc.) and modes (visual, writ- for reading, writing,
and researching pro-
ten, oral, aural), a recognition that research takes many forms and relies on
cesses.
multiple senses.
 6 Chapter 1

Uncertainty and Curiosity

Even though you may Research does not start with a thesis statement. It starts with a question. And
have been taught that though research is recursive,* which means that you will move back and forth
writing proceeds in between various stages in your research and writing process, developing an
a straight line—from effective question might in itself be the most important part of the research
freewriting to outlin- process. Because there’s really no point in doing a research project if you al-
ing to drafting—re- ready know the answer. That is boring. But it is how we are often taught to do
search shows that as research: we decide what we’re going to argue, we look for those things that
we write, we move
support that argument, and then we write up the thing that we knew from the
between and among
these phases. Writ-
outset. If that sounds familiar, we suggest that you scrap that plan.
ing—and research—is Instead, we suggest approaching research with an orientation of openness,
far more like a torna- ready and willing to be surprised, to change your mind. Of course, you never
do than a straight line. approach research in a vacuum. You probably have ideas about whatever it is
that you’re working on. You probably have thoughts about what the answers
are to your research questions, and that is as it should be, but that statement of
belief should not be where you start.

Try This: Consider Everyday Contexts You Have Engaged in Research (15 minutes)
Take a moment to think about the many occasions when you have gathered information to answer a
question outside of an academic context (i.e., What is the most effective deodorant? Where is the best
place to eat? What is the fastest route home?):
1. First, make a list of some of these everyday questions you have identified and the answers you have
come up with in your research.
2. Select one that is still interesting to you—one that you may have answered but suspect there are
more answers to or one that the answer you identified was only partial.
3. Note the method or tool you selected to answer the question.
4. Make a list of other methods you might employ to answer your original question.
5. Reflect on how identifying alternative research methods might lead you to different answers to
your original question, then make a new research plan.
What Are Research Methods 7

We hope you cultivate an exploratory motive, an orientation of openness,

and a willingness to learn. Adopting such a disposition is your work. Get
ready to find data that conflicts with what you have come to know about a
particular issue. You might even think about your thesis statement as the
last thing that you develop in your research project. Let curiosity drive you
forward in your work. Research is really only worth engaging in if you learn
something from it.
We often think about research as knowing, but it’s really about the mak-
ing of knowledge(s), the movement from not knowing to beginning to know,
figuring things out, trying to solve or sort out tricky problems. At the end of
an effective research project, we usually have more questions than we started
with. Sure, we answer the initial question (if all goes well), but that process of
building knowledge usually leads to more questions and helps us recognize
what we don’t know.
Developing a research orientation includes seeing the world around you
as abundant with research opportunities. Harness your curiosity, embrace un-
certainty, and begin looking for researchable questions.

Try This: Make a List of Curios (30 minutes)

Reflect on times that you’ve gotten wrapped up in something—when you looked away from the
clock and suddenly two hours had passed. What were you doing? Cooking, reading, engaging in a
good conversation, playing a game, watching tv, hiking? Identify that experience and consider the
following questions:
• What was it that made time fly?
• How might you capture that energy in a research experience?
Now make a curio cabinet of sorts. A curio is a special, mysterious object that inspires curiosity. Cab-
inets of curiosities were popularized in Europe in the late sixteenth century. They featured items from
abroad and unique artifacts from the natural world. Such spaces allowed collectors to assemble and
display collections that catalogued their interests and travels and that inspired awe in their reception.
Create a curio cabinet for yourself, either by assembling a collection of artifacts that describe your
interests, composing an image that represents your curiosities, or developing a textual representation
of questions that interest you.
 8 Chapter 1

No matter where your research and writing take you—in terms of major,
interest, or profession—it’s useful to consistently reflect on what, why, and how
you’re conducting research at each step in the process. This attention to think-
ing about your thinking is called metacognition. This process may sound ex-
hausting, and it can be, especially at first, but being metacognitive about your
research will help you transfer your learning into new contexts. Having this
orientation toward your research ensures that you have intention in each step
you take. The more you practice this approach to research, the easier it gets so
that it eventually becomes instinctual.

Rhetorical Foundations of Research

What we have described thus far is a rhetorical approach to the research
process. Derived from classical Greek influences, the five ancient canons of
rhetoric include invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. In
the context of writing and research, these long established, foundational con-
cepts also go by other names, such as pre-writing, organization, mechanics
and grammar, process, and circulation of a research product. We want to keep
in mind these qualities of effective communication throughout the chapter,
but we’ll spend significant time with invention and delivery—canons that we
think often get pushed aside or treated as afterthoughts in many approaches
to research and research-based writing and that we pay particular attention to
in this text.
As you familiarize yourself with an issue and the way scholars have talked
about it, take note of the specific ways they talk about the issue and consider
why that is. This is how you develop a rhetorical awareness of the ways in
which research is constructed. So when you read, read like a researcher: con-
sider both what is said about an issue and how it is said. Identify the rhetorical
situation of the piece of writing; this includes the context in which it is writ-
ten, the audience for whom it is written, and its purpose.
In this book, we aim to familiarize you with a range of research genres. We
begin here with a research proposal, but throughout this book we also high-
What Are Research Methods 9

light other research genres that may be more or less familiar to you: literature
reviews, coding schemas, annotated maps, research memos, slide decks, and
posters. Each time you encounter a new genre, we encourage you to place it
in its communicative context: What is the reason to compose this way? What
need does it fulfill for its audience? What situation is it most suited to? What
communication problem does it solve? We hope that working through re-
search genres in this way will also help you understand your own research
process more fully.

Try This: Go on a Scavenger Hunt to Identify Genres in “The Wild” (30 minutes)
With a partner or two, walk around identifying, photographing, documenting, and analyzing
genres in your midst. If you’re at a university, you might see posters, signs, and bulletin boards. If
you’re at home, you’ll see different genres, and if you’re at a coffee shop, you’ll see yet another set
of genres.
Consider this: one genre found in a coffee shop is a menu. It might be on a board, or there may
be paper menus that each customer can pick up, but this genre is reliably found in coffee shops
throughout the US. Wherever you are, be attentive to the genres that surround you by doing the
following:
1. Make a list of the genres (the kind of texts) that make up your immediate environment.
2. Choose one genre that interests you and consider its rhetorical situation:
a. What is the context in which it is written?
b. Who is its audience?
c. What is the genre’s purpose?
3. More broadly, consider the genre’s communicative context:
a. How is this particular example of the genre composed?
b. What communication problem does it solve?
How might such rhetorical knowledge about genre impact your approach to matching research ques-
tions to methods and delivery?
 10 Chapter 1

Research Example: Student

Writing Habits
Let’s use an example to illustrate what happens at the beginning of a research
project. Like us, you might be interested in student writing habits. In particu-
lar, you might research when (and why) students begin a research project: Do
they begin when it is assigned? Two weeks in advance? The night before?
Other researchers have looked at this issue, so you might begin by exam-
ining what they have found. These secondary sources, the findings of oth-
er thinkers, constitute the critical conversation and might give you ideas for
how you might proceed in your own project (for a method to use for tracing
sources and their connections, see Chapter 3). Thus, examining this conver-
sation might function as pre-writing, brainstorming, or invention for your
research. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke uses the metaphor of a party to describe
how critical conversations work: When you arrive at the party, the conversa-
tions have been going on for a while, and guests take turns articulating their
points of view, sometimes talking over each other, sometimes interrupting,
laughing, disagreeing, and agreeing. After listening for a while, you under-
stand the conversation and have something to say, so you chime in, maybe
building on what a previous guest has said or contrasting your ideas with a
friend’s. Finally, you’re tired and have to head home, but when you do, the
sounds of the party are still ringing in your ears, and the conversation will
clearly continue.
But if you’re conducting primary research that moves beyond working
with sources, the key is to next find out what this particular issue looks like
in your local context, or in a specific context in which you’re interested. Most
likely, scholars have not examined the issue of when students begin their as-
signments at your institution, and many factors may impact your context
that might make your findings different than what you’ve learned from other
scholars. Research methods give researchers recognizable ways to continue
the party conversation started by secondary sources.
So the next step is effective research design. You might articulate this plan
in a research proposal, further detailed at the end of this chapter. When you
What Are Research Methods 11

are beginning a new research project, the design is expected to be mixed up

and messy, because oftentimes you are sorting through many different possi-
bilities. Thus, we encourage you to notice and to write about the messiness of
an emerging research design, pausing often to pose the following questions:
What are you wondering about now?* and, How are these curiosities connect- Writing is a thinking
ing, drawing your attention to matters you hadn’t considered before? While process, not just a
it’s important to notice these inklings as you go, many effective researchers communication pro-
also write about them as a way to record (to help with memory) and focus. cess. Integrate writing
The activity of writing while researching demands patience and persistence, into your research
and yet the emerging research design will be magnitudes more refined in later process as a method
stages as a result. for thinking through
your ideas.
Design your research project so that your questions, methods, data, find-
ings, and conclusions match up and so that you select or develop primary
source data that will be most useful for your particular interest. For instance,
if you only have data for about 30 students on campus, you can’t generalize
about how all students approach the writing process. If you only know when
these students start working on a given writing project, you won’t know why
they started at that particular time. This doesn’t mean the information you
have isn’t useful; it just means that you need to stay close to your data and
only make sense of the information you have. Make note of things you want to
know and wish you had more data about so you can develop the project if the
opportunity arises.
For this research project on timing in student writing projects, you might
develop a survey that asks students when they begin their research project as
well as a series of related questions about motivation and timing. If you design
a survey that gives students choices to select answers that range from “I begin a
project when it is assigned” to “I begin a project the morning that it’s due,” you
will develop quantitative data, or representative numbers, that answer your
question. If you’re interested in longer, more nuanced answers, you might also
provide open-ended questions on your survey, and you’ll develop both quan-
titative and qualitative data, or non-numeric data not organized according to
a specific, numerical pattern.
A survey develops data that might be easily counted and categorized and
can be offered to many folks. But you might be interested in more specific,
 12 Chapter 1

extensive qualitative data than what you can gather through a survey. Your
interest might be not just when students start a project, but also why they start
at that specific time and if that starting time is a habit or if it depends on what
they’re writing about or in which class it is assigned. If these are your interests,
it might be more effective to work with people (see Chapter 6) to develop an
interview protocol or a case-study approach, methods that would require you
to ask fewer people about their study habits but would allow you to develop
a deeper understanding of each individual student’s writing habits. One isn’t
necessarily better or worse. Like all research methods, each approach provides
different data and different opportunities for analysis. It just depends on what
you want to know.
Surveys, interviews—these might be methods with which you’re familiar,
but there are lots of other useful methods for working with people. You might
want to understand student writing processes by looking at all of a particular
student’s writing for a given project. Instead of asking the student about her
habits and working with reported data, or information that someone has told
you, you might use a kind of textual analysis (we’ll detail some varieties of this
in Chapter 4) to read all of her notes and drafts for a particular project to better
understand not just what she reports about her writing practices but how and
what and when she actually writes in the lead up to a due date. Sometimes our
perceptions of our actions differ than what we actually do, particularly in re-
gard to writing habits, so collecting data that’s not reported can be helpful. Or
you might want to observe that student while she writes to notice how often

Try This: Plan Your Own Writing Research Project (30 minutes)
What are your research questions about writing? Consider the examples we’ve given and develop
your own questions on the topic, then think about possible methods you can use to investigate those
questions:
1. List your interests in and questions about writing and the research process.
2. Identify one area of interest on your list and develop it into an effective research question (a ques-
tion that does not have a yes/no answer, one that requires primary research to answer).
3. Consider what methods might be appropriate to help you answer the question you have identified.
What Are Research Methods 13

she takes breaks, if she texts while she writes, or if she listens to music. You
might ask her to take pictures of herself or her writing environment at differ-
ent points during the writing process, and you might develop a comparative
visual analysis of the images (see Chapter 7).

Research Example: Access

to Clean Water
Here’s an example of how to develop a research plan. Imagine you’re interested
in developing a project about water, a topic that has been in the news quite
a bit as of late. Depending on your specific interest and the kind of data you
are interested in collecting and working with, you can design very different
research proposals:
• If you want to work with sources, maybe you’ll select developing
a “worknet” as a research method (see Chapter 3). Your work with
sources would find a focal article to generate a radial diagram as you
select and highlight connections. One emerging connection, such
as a linkage between long-term health outcomes and access to water
filtration systems, can begin to crystalize as a research question that
guides you in seeking and finding further sources or in choosing other
methods appropriate to pairing with the question.
• If you want to work with words (see Chapter 4), maybe you’ll select
content analysis as a research method to make sense of the discourse
you find on your local water treatment plant’s website. You might find
that there is specialized or technical language, such as multiple men-
tions of contamination of which you were not aware, or terms with
which you are unfamiliar (e.g., acidity, PPM, or pH). Gathering these
terms and beginning to investigate their meanings can serve as the
genesis of an emerging research focus.
• If you want to work with people (see Chapter 5), maybe you’ll select
survey as a research method, and you’ll distribute a survey about drink-
ing water to everyone in your classes, perhaps asking questions about
 14 Chapter 1

their uses of water fountains and bottle refill stations or their knowledge
about where their water comes from. You may learn that folks in your
community have not had consistent access to potable water.
• If you want to work with places and things (see Chapter 6), maybe
you’ll select site observation as a research method, and you’ll schedule
a visit to your local water treatment plant. You may discover upon
visiting that the plant is adjacent to a number of factories, or that it
is difficult to access, perhaps that there is no one to give you a tour,
or that much of the area is off limits. All of these on-site discoveries,
carefully chronicled, substantiate distinctive ways of knowing not
otherwise available.
• If you want to work with images (see Chapter 7), maybe you’ll visit
a local river, stream, or lake shore and photograph scenes where litter
and wildlife are in close proximity, or where signs communicate about
expectations for environmental care. A selection of such images may
stand as a convincing set of visual evidence and may accompany a
simple map identifying locations where you found problems or where
additional signage is needed.

Try This: Brainstorming with Methods (30 minutes)

We’ve illustrated two examples, one focusing on the timing of student writing projects and another
focusing on water. Now try this out on your own. Select an interest and work through how each of the
methods listed would generate different data with the potential to draw different kinds of connections:
• Working with sources
• Working with words
• Working with people
• Working with places and things
• Working with images
As you consider an interest in light of each of these research methods, now would also be a good time
to revisit the book’s table of contents and then to turn to the chapters themselves to leaf around and
begin to see the more specific and nuanced approaches to the methods under each heading.
What Are Research Methods 15

The data you work with and the conclusions you can draw are dependent
on the research method you select. Each approach provides particular insights
into your topic and the world more broadly.

Research Across the Disciplines

Research conventions,* or the expectations about how research is conduct- Research conventions
ed and written about, differ across the disciplines—whether that is theatre, adapt and change
mathematics, criminal justice, anthropology, etc. Some disciplines general- right along with
ly value quantitative data over qualitative data and vice versa. Many disci- the people who do
plines gravitate to certain methods and methodologies and specific patterns research, the prob-
lems to which the
of writing up and citing data. Usually these conventions can be rhetorically
research responds,
traced to the values of a particular discipline. For instance, many humanities and contemporary
disciplines (English and World Languages, for instance) favor using MLA technologies.
style to cite sources, and many social science disciplines (Psychology and
Sociology, for instance) generally adhere to APA style. One of the primary
differences in these citation styles is that MLA generally privileges author
name and page number, which can be traced to the importance of specific
wording at the heart of language study. APA privileges author name and
year, which can be traced to the ways that social sciences value when some-
thing was published.
Citation conventions are one of the most concrete, visible differences that
distinguish research across disciplines. But the differences are often much
deeper and more abstract. How do you decide which method is appropri-
ate for a particular research project? How do you make data meaningful in
a particular context? The way you answer these questions constitutes your
research methodology, or your thinking about a research project—and
methodology, similar to citation style, usually demonstrates disciplinary
values. Whether or not you state your methodology, everyone has a way of
thinking about the method they choose and how the data they are using
matters. Articulating a methodology simply makes that approach transpar-
ent to your audience and clear to yourself. Thus, a research methodology is
the approach to a method, or the understanding and thinking that organizes
 16 Chapter 1

a particular method, as we show in Figure 1.1. Returning again to the etymol-

ogy of “method” noted earlier (meta- and -hodos), consider the new part of
the term, -ology. This addition assigns to method its reason for being select-
ed. Accounting explicitly for the rationale, motives, and appropriateness of a
research design, a methodology answers to justifications, underlying values,
and established traditions for how knowledge is made and what kinds of
knowledge matters in a given discipline.
For example, if you survey 100 people at your university about the tim-
ing of their writing projects, and you develop quantitative data as a result
of your survey, you present that data as meaningful and suggest that such
numbers provide a useful window into understanding student writing.
However, you might not agree with this approach. You might think that
to really understand student writing, you need to talk to students and ask
open-ended questions. Or, you might believe that reported data about writ-
ing behaviors is not meaningful because we know that what people say they
do and what they actually do are often very different things. You may be-
lieve that we need mixed methods to most effectively provide a portrait of
student writing on campus, so you might design your study such that you

Figure 1.1. Components of methodology in research design.

What Are Research Methods 17

incorporate both survey and interview data. Ultimately the kind of data
that methodology values is related to disciplinary values, and as you select
a research project, a professional focus, and a profession, you will inherit
disciplinary values. For example, researchers in the humanities might espe-
cially value qualitative data, and researchers in STEM fields might especial-
ly value quantitative data. As you become a more ingrained member of a
disciplinary community (for instance when the major or job you take starts
to feel familiar) we encourage you to keep questioning the methodology
and values you inherit.
In Figure 1.2, we show how developing more questions along the way in all
parts of your research design may give way to more complexity in your project.
Critical conversations about research are both normative, in that they
usually bring together many scholars’ thinking about a particular issue,
and disruptive, in that new findings can up-end a particular conversation.
Much of these changes are attributable to developments in methodology,
such as updates in how we value a particular method or how we interpret
certain findings. Changes to methodologies often cause significant ruptures
in research communities. We are familiar with some of these large ruptures:

Figure 1.2. Complexity in research design.

 18 Chapter 1

the earth revolves around the sun instead of the reverse, bleeding a patient
does not make her healthier, students learn most effectively through practice
rather than listening by rote, etc. It is not always easy to come across find-
ings that cause a rupture; however, as you examine the evolution of critical
conversations over time, you might notice that they change slowly as new
ruptures slowly become accepted in their associated communities.

Using Research Methods Ethically

The decisions you make in developing an effective research question, match-
ing it to an appropriate research method, and then responsibly analyzing
the implications of your findings (research design), are especially import-
ant because research is subjective. Subjectivity is often seen as negative and
is frequently leveled as a reason to mistrust a decision or judgment, as in,
“You’re just being subjective.” But: all research is subjective, all research is
communication. Of course, not all scholars and fields believe this, but let us
try to convince you, because it is important. This belief is central to conduct-
You may think of ing ethical research.
objectivity as being There is no pure objectivity when it comes to research. Research is con-
defined as “without ducted by people, all of whom have different ideas about effective research,
bias.” Yet it is far more
but researchers abide by a code of ethics that holds them to standards that
complex! Marianne
Janack (2002) lists help them maintain safety and develop meaningful research. Even quantitative
13 different ways we research, even computer algorithms that identify trends—all of the methods
might consider objec- associated with developing this data are engineered by people and are, thus,
tivity, from a scientific subjective. And this is a good thing!
method, to disinter- Instead of striving for objective* research (an impossibility), we strive
est, to rationality, to for ethical research. Ethical research takes into account the fact that people
an attitude of “psy-
perform research and that their research designs are impacted by their own
chological distance”
subjectivities: the thoughts, beliefs, and values that make us human. As re-
(275). What do you
mean when you use searchers, it is essential to be reflective on our subjectivities, mitigate subjec-
the term “objective”? tivities that might make us conduct research unfairly, and adhere to high eth-
ical standards for research. We will spend more time working through these
ethical considerations in Chapter 2.
What Are Research Methods 19

Developing a Research Proposal

Much of what we’ve discussed in this chapter is about ideas and about how
to approach research broadly. A tangible way to make sense of these ideas is
by developing a research proposal. A proposal allows you to concretize your
thinking about a project and receive feedback on your plan. This is a crucial
step because an instructor, mentor, or peer might help you improve your re-
search design and better align your question, method, and data to help you
develop useful findings. A proposal is an inventional method, not a contract.
As you learn more about your topic, you will most likely refine your research
question, and you may even decide on a different method. In each chapter,
we’ll introduce further methods for invention and innovative ways to ap-
proach a research question, perhaps in ways you haven’t before. One thing
to keep in mind as you plan your research is how you may want to present
your work (delivery) and who may be interested in your research (audience).
Sometimes the research we do remains relatively private, but usually the pur-
pose of research is to develop new knowledge and share it, as we discuss in
Chapter 8. Spread the word, contribute to the critical conversation about the
area in which you’re interested so that others can test out your ideas, build on
your ideas, and use the knowledge you’ve developed. Maintain this audience
awareness throughout your research process, even from the beginning—it will
impact how you design and deliver your work.

Focus on Delivery: Writing

a Research Proposal
A research proposal is a stated plan for research, which may change, and some
of which should change throughout the course of your project. This is a plan
for your project, but as the saying goes, “the best laid plans…”
A research proposal should include the following:
• A clear articulation of your question;
• The critical conversation to which you hope your research contributes;
 20 Chapter 1

• Your chosen research method;

• The basic methodology that guides your choice of method;
• Plans for how you will make sense of your data.
You should not have a thesis or a conclusion. Since you haven’t done the
research yet, this would be impossible.
Instead, allow your proposal to be exploratory, and make sure that it is in-
teresting to you, that you’re asking a question that you actually want to know
the answer to. This small step is crucial to developing an engaging, thoughtful
project. If you’re not interested in the question you pose, keep asking ques-
tions, keep inventing until you come upon something you care about. If you
struggle with this process, reach out to an instructor, mentor, or peer; talking
to someone else is one of the simplest and most generative inventional oppor-
tunities around!

Works Cited
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. University of California Press, 1974.
Janack, Marianne. “Dilemmas of Objectivity.” Social Epistemology: A Journal of
Knowledge, Culture and Policy, vol. 16, no. 3, 2002, pp. 267-281. Taylor & Francis
Online, doi.org/10.1080/0269172022000025624.
Chapter 2. Making
Research Ethical
“[E]very methods-based decision is also an ethical decision.”
-Heidi McKee

He wrote a juicy memoir claiming the discovery of the DNA double helix
model as his own, casting aspersions on his long-time collaborators.
After she got the results back from her DNA testing kit, she learned of a
family predisposition for a genetic disorder that she had passed down to her
children unknowingly.
The ancestry software he purchased showed a direct family connection to
infamous slave-owners.
They named the genetically cloned sheep Dolly after Dolly Parton, for pret-
ty tawdry reasons.
Although she ran an organic farm, she often found that genetically modified
seeds made their way into her fields, distributed by winds from nearby farms.
The brief anecdotes that begin this chapter constitute just some of the ethical
quandaries resulting from what some have termed “The Birth of Molecular
Biology,” the development of the DNA double helix model. This important sci-
entific finding was peopled with unethical behavior and scandal, and the many
resulting questions that have arisen from the discovery continue to churn both
inside of and external to the scientific community: Should DNA be modified?
For food? For people? For sheep? What about ancestry software and genetic
testing? Who should have access to genetic data, and what should they be al-
lowed to do with it? Such ethical considerations are an important component
of this research project. Consider the following questions that help address
ethical issues when conducting research:
• How is research developed and by whom?
• How are data and participants treated and protected during the
research process?
21
 22 Chapter 2

• Who claims credit for the work conducted? Who cites others as col-
laborators and forebears of their work?
• Is research written about intimately, distantly, in first person, in third
person?
• How is data stored? Who has access to data?
• Who benefits or is hurt by research?
All of these questions (and more!) make up the ethical component of re-
search design. Understanding research ethics and wrestling with the often
complex questions that the ethical component of research design entails are
essential elements of conducting effective, responsible research. Research
ethics address the evolving conventions, codes of conduct, and standards re-
search communities adopt to strive for ethical development and circulation of
research and to protect audiences, authors, and their research contributions.

Ethical Approaches to Research

The scientific method, which is often the foundation for much of our under-
standing about the research process, asks us to strive for objectivity. This is a
positivist approach to research that assumes that there is one clear answer to a
research question. However, in contemporary contexts, and certainly in the ex-
ample of the development of the double helix DNA model, most scholars have
agreed that research is rarely so clear cut. There are usually multiple answers to
research questions—some better, some more conventional, some more accept-
ed by communities of practice than others. This lack of certainty can some-
times worry apprentice researchers; they might be concerned that any answer
is right or that research is more about saying the right thing rather than striving
for answers. This is not the case! It just means that in this constructivist world
of research—an understanding of research that considers the interactions be-
tween researchers, research subjects, and their environments—our goal is not
objectivity but fairness and an ethical approach to research.
Further, some researchers suggest that the goal of research is strong
objectivity, an orientation toward research that acknowledges the role of peo-
Making Research Ethical 23

ple in developing research and encourages researchers to acknowledge their

own subjectivities, or the potential biases and experiences that might impact Accepting that
their approach to research design and data analysis.* research is complex
and that there are no
easy, clear answers
Ethos is Collective and Individual makes the research
process more honest,
more exciting, more
We often reduce ethos to considering whether a particular author is credible, effective, and, ironical-
but ethos is largely collective. Pause for a moment and consider where and ly, less biased.
why you’re reading this text. Most likely you’ve selected a place to sit and read
because of a combination of reasons related to convenience, access, necessity,
and reputation. Let’s focus on the latter in particular. If you’re reading at work,
a coffee shop, or at home, you may have chosen this place because you’ve talk-
ed with others about the right place to study, or you might have taken friends
and family’s advice because you trust them. You’re reading this book because
you’re in a class at an institution that values your experiences with writing, and
your instructor has selected a text based on many factors, including its repu-
table publisher and authors who actively conduct research on the subject area.
So even though you may be sitting alone with a book, there are many people
who stand behind you, impacting the decisions you make and your broader
credibility as a student and learner. And even though the names of only three
authors appear on this book, there are hundreds of friends, family members,
scholars, publishers, and editors who have contributed to the content and col-
lective ethos of this book.
It goes deeper: your instructor has an impact on your ethos, just as you
have an impact on them. If you do well in the class, it suggests that she is a
good instructor. This might impact her status at the university, her qualifi-
cation for a potential promotion, or her standing in the department. If you
mention down the road that you had this particular instructor, someone else
may expect that you’re a good writer because you have had good instruction,
and they may hire you for an internship or job, or maybe they’ll ask you to
complete a challenging project because your instructor has contributed to
your ethos as an effective writer. Your classmates impact your ethos, and you
theirs. If your classmates are effective writers in their careers post-gradua-
 24 Chapter 2

tion, graduates from your university may gain a reputation for being partic-
Although we often ularly well-qualified for careers in communication. This could impact your
boil down questions prospects when you graduate, and your performance will impact students
of ethos to individ- who graduate after you as well. Your college or university impacts your
uals, they are just ethos.* And the network continues.
one access point in a
When you decide that a particular author is credible and has a reliable
network of ethos that
is largely collective ethos, it’s because a network of people have helped establish that—the journal
and constantly shifting in which they have published, the institutions and organizations to which they
and circulating. belong, their partners and families, etc.

Ethics and Secondary Research

As we noted in the introduction, many of our recommendations in this book
oscillate between recommendations for invention—developing access points

Try This: Consider What Activities and People Impact Your Ethos (30 minutes)
You have had a long history as a reader and writer. The people, places, and activities with which you
have come into contact during this history impact your ethos.
Compose a drawing that illustrates the network of influences that collectively constitute your ethos.
You may hand-sketch or use clip-art, stick figures, and/or text to develop your composition. The goal
is to make tangible the collective nature of your own ethos so that you can consider how this principle
extends to other researchers. Consider the following invention questions to help develop your com-
position:
• What are your earliest reading and writing experiences? Who and what contributed?
• What was the first primary research project you conducted (think of “research” broadly—any
time you test a theory or answer a question for yourself, you’re doing a form of primary re-
search)? Who influenced the research?
• Who has taught you about conducting research? What are the primary lessons you’ve learned?
• What formal school and learning experiences impact your approach to research?
• What experiences external to school impact your approach to research?
Making Research Ethical 25

for your research project, or what some refer to, in part, as prewriting or brain-
storming—and delivery—the ways in which your research project is commu-
nicated, or delivered, to an audience. An ethical approach to research should
impact both invention and delivery in relation to your project. A starting place
for many research projects includes the invention associated with identifying
secondary research that informs your project. Chapter 3: Worknets provides
a specific framework for reading sources deeply. In particular, we describe
four methods, or phases, for reading secondary research. The first phase is the
semantic phase, which asks you to be attentive to keywords in the text you’ve
selected. The second phase is the bibliographic phase, which asks you to trace
intersections between sources. The third phase is the affinity phase, which
invites you to consider how writers are connected to each other. And finally,
the fourth phase, the choric phase, asks you to consider the broader rhetorical
context in which an article is written. Before you delve into this framework
in detail, consider how secondary research that forms a critical conversation
about an issue is constructed. In this section we’ll also work to identify how to
establish ethos, evaluate texts and authors, and learn citation systems, process-
es associated with an ethical approach to secondary research.

Establishing Ethos
One of the primary ways that researchers demonstrate their understanding Although uptake
of research convention and establish ethos is by carefully citing the authors sounds nebulous, you
they’ve read who have contributed to the critical conversation they’d like to can see it in action
join. Ethos is an author’s credibility, or the trust an author establishes with an every time some-
audience, and it can be a measure of how much uptake,* or interest, influence, one on social media
and sharing, their work gets once they’ve completed a research project. When shares a particular
researching your area of interest, knowing what a particular community has message, meme, or
said about it and finding the niche or gap in the research about it provides an visual.
opportunity for you to make a contribution to this conversation. Thoroughly
reading secondary sources and genuinely representing others’ ideas is part of
an ethical approach to secondary research that helps establish your ethos and
that may pave the way for you to add your voice in ways that are important to a
 26 Chapter 2

given community. Chapter 3 helps demonstrate an ethical level of engagement

with which researchers should consider secondary sources.
For instance, one of our former students, Gabriel Green, collaborated on a
research project that considered the impact of campus crime and safety alerts.
The project started with a question that we shared—how do the safety alerts
impact the campus community? He engaged in primary research, gathering
university records of crime alerts since the beginning of their circulation. He
also considered secondary research, the critical conversation surrounding
on-campus safety. By effectively citing experts in the field to demonstrate his
knowledge of the current, existing discussion, he was able to establish ethos
and craft an engaging exigency, or timely reason, to situate the research.
Demonstrating understanding of critical conversations and research con-
ventions is key to establishing ethos, but having personal experience related
to an issue can also make a researcher particularly well-suited for a particular

Try This: Making an Argument for Your Research by Identifying an Opening (1 hour)
Effective research proposals (Chapter 1) spotlight for readers how the researcher is connected to the
work of others. Such gestures can deepen the researcher’s ethos because they acknowledge that this
new work bears relation to what has preceded it. Based on his work examining how scholars introduce
research projects by demonstrating a gap in the critical conversation, John Swales developed a model
to show apprentice researchers to do the same. Swales observed that scholars make the following basic
moves:
• Name the critical conversation. This might include scholarly discussions of strategies for suc-
cess in university writing, ethical considerations for the research process, concerns about the
financial stability of a particular institution, etc.
• Identify threads or themes related to the research area. In this step, writers narrow their
focus and cite authors their work draws from and to which they hope to respond.
• Articulate what has not been said before and explain why it is important that we consider
this particular aspect of the issue.
• State their argument and demonstrate its importance in contributing to the identified open-
ing in the research conversation.
Try it out for the secondary research you do!
Making Research Ethical 27

project. Student researcher Zepher Barber developed a project about the best
ways for students to prepare for first-year writing and to acclimate to the uni-
versity. Because she was a successful, experienced, first-year student herself,
Ms. Barber was an especially effective researcher to develop such a project. By
claiming her status as a first-year student, and thus her privileged proximity to
the area of research that she was writing about, she helped establish her ethos.
Ethos is thus emplaced: it is related to the “where’”of a writing situation, the
“who” conducting the research, and the “when” that animates the experience.

Evaluating Texts and Authors

When you approach an article, you want to consider the venue and the au-
thors’ collective ethos. If you search for peer-reviewed secondary research
through a library database, research that has been considered and shared by
a community of experts, this technology helps you identify credible sourc-
es. Database searches often (though not always) filter out sources that have
not been verified as credible by peers within a research community. But why
is peer review so important? Why are peer-reviewed sources often priv-
ileged over other types of sources? It helps to know how the peer review
process works.
Consider this textbook. Before this book got to you, it went through a long
peer review and editorial process in which multiple people reviewed the work
and provided feedback. This process is demonstrated in Figure 2.1. We first
developed a book proposal, which went to the publisher. It then went out for
peer review to eight experts in the field, writing teachers from all kinds of uni-
versities and colleges. They provided feedback, and we developed a draft of the
book based on those reviews. Then we sent the complete draft to our editor,
received feedback from her, made changes, and then chapters of the book were
again sent to expert peer reviewers. The whole process took a few years!
Journal articles are a little different. Once you complete the research and
write the article, you send it to a journal. The editor decides whether the article
is appropriate to send out for review by asking questions like the following:
Are these authors credible? Do they use evidence to support their claims? Are
 28 Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. The development and review process for this book.

they arguing something totally wacky and empirically wrong? If the editor
decides it is appropriate to do so, she sends the chapter to at least two experts
in the field, and any of the authors’ identifying aspects are removed so that
they are anonymous. The reviewers decide whether the article is appropriate
for publication and whether the authors should make any changes. This part
of the process usually takes at least a year.
So why bother? Why engage in such a long process? The time, multiple
perspectives, opportunities for revision and reflection, and multiple layers of
review help ensure that the ideas that are shared represent rigorous, effective,
and ethical research. Peer review ensures that there are multiple experts who
vouch for the ideas shared, and in this way the article shares the collective
ethos of the community who has engaged with the work. This is in contrast
to a newspaper article, which usually has at least one other person who has
Making Research Ethical 29

read the work, and a blog or independent website, in which the author may be
the only one who has read and reviewed the material. This doesn’t mean that
information from other sources is incorrect; it just means that you have to be
even more careful about considering the ethos of the author and article be-
cause the peer review process hasn’t helped do that for you. You are forced to
rely more on the author’s individual ethos rather than consider the collective
ethos that is communicated through peer review.
Especially if your project requires that you do research outside of peer-re-
viewed venues (and there are lots of good reasons for this!), you might ask the
following questions of the sources with which you engage (and make sure to
visit Chapter 3, which provides a framework for working deeply with sources):
• What are the authors’ relationship to the area of research?
• What credentials do they have that help establish their expertise in
this area?
• Do the authors have any subjectivities that might compromise their
ability to develop credible research?
Remember, providing an opinion or having subjectivities does not mean
that an author lacks credibility.* You just have to consider how honest an author
is about those opinions and subjectivities and whether they let their values and
beliefs compromise their ability to do ethical research. These considerations All people have opin-
function in everyday life, too. If someone invites you to a restaurant they own ions and subjectivities;
it is essentially the
and tells you that it’s the best restaurant in town, you might question their abil-
definition of being
ity to make an informed opinion. They have a vested, economic interest in you
human—subjectivities
visiting their restaurant. However, if a friend eats at that restaurant every week are inescapable.
and tells you it’s the best restaurant in town, you might take their opinion more
seriously. They have a clear opinion, and they’re subjective about the restau-
rant (they love it!), but their ideas aren’t compromised by their relationship to
the restaurant. If you hear from multiple friends whose opinions you respect
that it’s the best restaurant around, you’ll probably plan to go check it out. All
of this is to say, awareness of an author’s opinion or subjectivity doesn’t mean
that an article is not credible. Folks who are honest about their subjectivities
should actually be viewed as potentially more credible than others who aren’t
aware of how their experiences impact their approach to research.
 30 Chapter 2

Learning Citation Systems

Once you’ve selected effective articles and spent time with them, how do you cite
them in your research project? And why should you cite them? Citing sources
provides a breadcrumb pathway for your audience so they can follow the re-
search path you’ve taken, make their own judgments about what you’ve found,
and perhaps disagree with your findings or add to what you’ve contributed. You
demonstrate your ethos as a credible, ethical researcher by correctly citing re-
search and being attentive to the conventions of research practice. Unfortunate-
ly, citations are often talked about as simply a vehicle to avoid plagiarism, but
we hope that you’ll move beyond such a perspective. Citations are important
because they’re trail markers or signposts on the research path. You put them
down so that both you and your audience remember where you’ve traversed.
Because research—when it’s good, when it’s engaging—is quite a ride. It takes
you to unexpected places, and if you don’t leave clear trail markers, it is very
possible to get lost. Further, research is a conversation between you and the
other researchers you’re citing and drawing on in the project you’ve developed.
When you cite, you highlight the different voices in the project. This multiple
voicing is indicative of how we communicate. We always bring other people’s
ideas into our communication, both written and spoken. This characteristic
of communication is known as intertextuality, a concept that describes how
Every choice—to in- other people’s language is seamlessly embedded in our own. Citation celebrates
clude an author’s full
this natural aspect of communication and makes it visible.
name or use their ini-
tial instead, to capital- There are many different citation systems. Communities in the humanities
ize every word in an often use Modern Language Association (MLA) style. Social science research
article title (or not!), communities often use American Psychological Association (APA) style.
to italicize or abbrevi- Many STEM fields have citation styles that are specific to individual journals
ate, to use a comma, or subdisciplines. Other disciplines use a version of Chicago Style. It can be
period, or semicolon, easy to feel that citations are arbitrary, but when you look at them closely and
or even to emphasize
alongside each other, the differences and conventions become more meaning-
the placement of the
year of publication—
ful. In fact, the conventions function as clues to what a particular discipline
is meaningful and has values and what kind of sources they use most.* This is part of why citation
reasons behind it. styles are updated so frequently; disciplinary values grow and change, partic-
ularly as the kinds of evidence they cite changes.
Making Research Ethical 31

Consider the style variations in Figures 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4 of a single citation
that represents an article we read to inform the beginning of this chapter:

Figure 2.2. Annotated MLA style citation.

MLA style: Halloran, S. Michael. “The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Es-
say in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 3,
no. 1, Sep. 1984, pp. 70-83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/465734.

Figure 2.3. Annotated APA style citation.

APA style: Halloran, S. M. (1984). The birth of molecular biology: An essay
in the rhetorical criticism of scientific discourse. Rhetoric Review, 3(1), 70–83.
https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198409359083

Try This: Comparing Citation Systems (30 minutes)

1. Locate a peer-reviewed source that aligns with your research interests.
2. Cite the source using different citation systems.
3. Next, compare citations, and examine them rhetorically.
a. What are the differences?
b. Consider, how does citation demonstrate disciplinary values?
c. How can order and punctuation be rhetorical and meaningful?
 32 Chapter 2

Figure 2.4. Annotated Chicago style citation.

Chicago style: Halloran, S. Michael. 1984. “The Birth of Molecular Biolo-
gy: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse.” Rhetoric Re-
If you work towards
making sense of the
view 3, no. 1 (September): 70–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198409359083.
citation systems You do not have to memorize a particular citation system, because it will
rather than just com- inevitably change as research conventions change. Instead, try to understand
mitting to memory the citation system that you use most frequently. Consider the components
where the various
and think through the relationship of this citation system to the disciplinary
commas go, it will
make more sense to
values that you see reflected.*
you and you will be
more flexible in mov-
ing between citation Ethics and Primary Research
styles if necessary. It
will also be less con- In subsequent chapters we will address numerous research methods for work-
fusing when you have ing with words (Chapter 4), people (Chapter 5), places and things (Chapter 6),
to update to a new and visuals (Chapter 7). Each set of methods requires different thinking when
version of the citation
it comes to ethics, but many of these considerations are related to the impact
system.
research has on people, the safety of their environment, and the potential ben-
efits or detriments to their privacy.

Working with Human Subjects

When you conduct primary research with human subjects (which might in-
clude texts, images, or places) you need to take into account particular ethical
aspects of your research. Imagine if the scientists who discovered the DNA
Double Helix had considered how their discovery might impact subsequent
generations. What if they had suggested guidelines? Or, what if they hadn’t
Making Research Ethical 33

fought over ownership of the model? How might their interactions with each
other have changed ethical approaches to the treatment of DNA data? Nowa-
days, universities have Institutional Review Boards (IRB) that approve and
make recommendations about research with human subjects. If you do not
intend to publish your research, your research is not necessarily replicable,
or it won’t contribute to generalized knowledge—conversations about research
to which particular communities and bodies of research orient, then you do
not necessarily need to have your research plan approved by an IRB. When in
doubt, you can always ask a faculty member or contact your IRB representa-
tive to see if your work is exempt. Even if your research need not be approved
by IRB, it is useful to consider their recommendations for ethical research
with human subjects because these regulations were developed to protect peo-
ple. Unfortunately, all of these regulations were developed because researchers
have conducted incredibly unethical research. Joseph Breault and other schol-
ars have detailed how our current guidelines have come to be. In brief, many
of our guidelines are a version of the 1976 Belmont Report, a report developed
by a commission, the purpose of which was to ensure informed consent and
ethical treatment of research participants. Informed consent is required when
you are conducting research with human subjects. This just means that you
ensure that the person you are surveying or interviewing (see Chapter 5 for
detailed focus on research methods designed for working with people) fully
understands the research in which they’re taking part and that they agree to
participate. It is important to let participants know what the research is about;
if there will be any benefits, danger, or threat to them; and that they can choose
not to participate at any time.
Informed consent and recommendations for ethical treatment of human
subjects is a response to inhumane research conducted by Nazis on people
during World War II. There have been other problematic, unethical studies—
too many to mention here—but one particularly heinous, well-known study
is the Tuskegee Study in which African American men infected with syphilis
went untreated for forty years so that researchers could examine the impact of
the disease. Subsequent regulations ensure that research does not hurt partic-
ipants and that participants are fully aware of what a study in which they take
part fully entails.
 34 Chapter 2

This notion of informed consent is central to ethical treatment of research

participants. Folks need to fully understand what they are agreeing to when
you ask them to participate in your research. There are some populations of
people—children, prisoners, mentally disabled persons, and pregnant wom-
en—who receive additional protections according to IRB protocols, so you
might take this into account if your research includes members of one of these
groups. Further, face-to-face research with people can differ from research
that you conduct in digital spaces. For instance, if you conduct an informal
poll through social media for the purposes of a research project, it may not feel
like you’re doing research, but you are! You will need to get consent from your
participants, though it might look different than obtaining consent in person.

Interacting with Audiences

The thing is, even if you don’t set out to interview or survey folks, your re-
search still might involve interaction with people, and ultimately, the goal of
research is to share your ideas with an audience. If you’re taking photographs
as part of your research, as you’ll spend time with in Chapter 7, you’ll have to

Try This: Learn About Your Institution’s IRB Office (30 minutes)
Every institution has their own IRB office, complete with their own guidelines and reporting struc-
tures. To get a sense of your institution’s ethical approach to research, find your IRB office’s website,
and consider the following:
• Who is on your institution’s IRB board? Are they faculty members? Staff members? What
disciplines do they represent?
• What is the process on your campus for conducting research with human subjects?
• Are there different expectations for undergraduate student, graduate student, faculty member,
and staff member researchers?
• How does your institution define research with human subjects? How does it define ethics?
You might also identify a nearby institution or a school you considered attending. Find its IRB office
website and compare it with the one at your school. Where are the overlaps? What is different? And
what is the significance of the comparisons you have made?
Making Research Ethical 35

consider whether or not people will end up in those images. And if so, do they
know they’re being photographed? If you’re doing textual research on a blog or
a Facebook community, even though the texts you’re considering are public,
folks might not think of that space as public. You’ll need to think through how
you interact with your potential research participants, data, and audience.
For instance, Kate is currently conducting a project that examines the im-
pact of plagiarism accusations on students and faculty members. All people in
her study are asked to consent to participate in the study. However, in talking
to research participants about their experiences, she has learned about other
students who have plagiarized. What is Kate’s responsibility as a researcher in
writing about these people who have plagiarized but who have not consented
to participate in her study? As a researcher, she needs to consider the expec-
tations for student privacy, the sensitivity of the material, and the potential
harms and/or benefits to the university community. Can she anonymize the
students in the stories she has heard, or would sharing any part of these narra-
tives cause the students to suffer? Key aspects to consider when making such
decisions are the relationship between the researcher and the research pop-
ulation—or proximity—and potential beneficence* of the research. In this
Beneficence asks
case, Kate is a faculty member, and her research participants are students, so whether the re-
although they all interact in the same sphere, there is a power differential that search is charitable,
complicates the relationship. The findings of Kate’s research have significantly equitable, and fair to
beneficial potential for the university, but not at the expense of outing students participants by taking
who have not shared their plagiarism stories publicly. into full account the
possible consequenc-
es for the researcher
Designing Writing That Does Ethical Work and the participants.

Hopefully you are already on board with the importance of approaching re-
search ethically, with ethics and fairness as your primary research objective
rather than objectivity. If you still have questions, or if you’re not sold on these
ideas yet, please don’t hesitate to talk to your instructor and colleagues (and
us!) about your questions, engage in your own research on ethics, and see
the end of this chapter for further reading recommendations. But if you are
ready to start designing ethical research, some important written products
to develop are research protocols, or your plan for research; scripts, or the
 36 Chapter 2

particular way you will describe your research to participants, particularly

for focus groups in which a group of people participate in the research or
there are multiple research facilitators; and participation or consent forms.

Try This Together: Considering Ethical Research (45 minutes)

In groups, consider the following situations, which include complex ethical components from re-
search projects scholars have developed. Talk through the ethical issues at hand: how might you han-
dle them?
• In 2012, scholar Jody Shipka bought six boxes from a yard sale that included personal pho-
tographs, diaries, and scrapbooks from a couple she did not know. These boxes inspired her
project, “Inhabiting Dorothy,” in which she attempted to travel and record the same paths that
the couple had catalogued in their materials. Dr. Shipka invited audience members to also
participate in the project, reenacting experiences and images of folks they do not know. What
are the ethical components at work here?
• Technical Communication Scholar Fernando Sanchez examined a 2017 court case in response
to gerrymandering in two Texas districts. He examined the ways that legislative mapmakers
used GIS software to create maps that make political arguments. How might maps and their
representations of people represent ethical or unethical research practices? How do images
and their representation impact audiences? How might subsequent researchers take up San-
chez’s findings?
• Heidi McKee described how in 2008 she read a research project that accidentally included
contact information for one of the research participants who was supposed to be anonymous.
The authors had included a screen capture of a newspaper article that described the research
participant’s brush with the law. Although the researchers meant to keep the subject’s identi-
ty secret, the screen capture was easily enlarged, and the article and identifying information
about the person was easily accessed. How does this experience highlight the complexities
of maintaining research participant anonymity? How does digital research and publication
impact this complexity?
• Photographer Christine Rogers developed a series of images between 2007-2008 titled “New
Family” in which she posed for family photos (complete with the quintessential hand on
shoulder pose) with people who were strangers to her. In what ways would Ms. Rogers have to
approach participants? What are the ethical considerations of such a project?
Making Research Ethical 37

Below, we’ll focus in particular on developing a participation form, which is

necessary for conducting research with human subjects. In Chapter 5, we out-
line specific research methods for working with people, including surveys, in-
terviews, and case studies, but before you do that work, you’ll need to make
sure that participants understand and want to participate in your research.
Often in working with human subjects, we are asked to “do no harm” and
to weigh the potential benefit to society in relation to the potential discomfort
to research participants. We hope that this chapter helps demonstrate why it
is so important (and complicated) to consider ethical questions in conduct-
ing secondary research and designing primary research, but we invite you to
go a step further. In the chapters that follow, you’ll be introduced to multiple
research methods and invited to develop invention activities for potential re-
search projects. Instead of merely considering how to avoid harm, consider
how your research might actually do good. How can we use these research
methods to not just perform ethical research but to in fact be more ethical?

Focus on Delivery: Composing

a Participation Form
The primary purpose of a participation or consent form is to ensure that re-
search participants understand what is being asked of them if they choose to
participate in your research so that they can fully and knowledgeably consent
(or choose not to consent). However, designing such a form is also important
invention work. Thinking through and writing down what participation in
your study entails helps you think through what you’re asking participants
to do, and it might help you revise and reconceive your project in productive
ways.
If you plan to publish your research (or you even just think you might want
to), if your research is replicable, if your research will contribute to general-
izable knowledge, or if you would like to work with protected populations,
you will need IRB approval for your research. Each IRB is a little different,
and they offer recommended templates as part of their resources for authors.
 38 Chapter 2

If your research does not require IRB approval, your form may include many
of the same components that IRB templates include, but the structure may
change depending on your project needs and interests. Your participation
form should address the following aspects of the research project:
• What, in detail, does your research entail?
• What will research participants be asked to do?
• Are there any risks or potential benefits to participants? Risks are pret-
ty obvious for medical research, but don’t forget that research about
writing can also elicit discomfort and potential risk for participants.
Consider whether your research might make someone uncomfortable.
Might your research have the potential to reveal something personal
regarding their sexuality, gender, citizenship, religion, etc.?
• Explain what product will be created out of the research—who will the
audience for that product be and in what venue will the findings be
shared?
• Will the research participants remain anonymous? Do you want them
to have the option to be anonymous or not? Perhaps they’ll want cred-
it for the ideas they’ve shared with you.
• Will research participants have an opportunity to comment on drafts
of the research or view the completed project?
Finally, make sure to give your research participants an out, meaning—let
them know that they don’t have to participate and that they can choose to not
participate at any time. This includes after the research is complete! Any time
before research is published, participants should have your contact informa-
tion so that they can let you know if they change their minds.

Works Cited
Breault, Joseph L. “Protecting Human Research Subjects: The Past Defines the
Future.” The Ochsner Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2006, pp. 15-20. PubMed Central, www.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127481/.
Halloran, S. Michael. “The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical
Making Research Ethical 39

Criticism of Scientific Discourse.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 3, no. 1, Sep. 1984, pp. 70-
83. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/465734.
McKee, Heidi. A. “Ethical and Legal Issues for Writing Researchers in an Age of
Media Convergence.” Computers and Composition, vol. 25, no. 1, 2008, pp. 104-22,
doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2007.09.007.
Rogers, Christine. New Family. www.cerogers.net/work/new-family.
Sánchez, Fernando. 2018. “Racial Gerrymandering and Geographic Information
Systems: Subverting the 2011 Texas District Map with Election Technologies.”
Technical Communication, vol. 65, no. 4, 2018, 354-370.
Shipka, Jody. “On Estate Sales, Archives, and the Matter of Making Things.” In Provo-
cations: Reconstructing the Archive. cccdigitalpress.org/book/reconstructingthear-
chive/shipka.html.
Swales, John. M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cam-
bridge UP, 1990.
Chapter 3. Working with Sources:
Worknets and Invention
To work with materials successfully, practitioners in many fields study how
something is made. They may turn to instructions and diagrams, or they
may take apart and put back together equipment. They may follow steps
essential to understanding better how things fit together, which parts of
a system are dependent on which other parts, and how—when things go
well—the system operates.
For example, a materials engineer at a bicycle manufacturer may look at
other models or even collect samples of bicycles and take them for a ride.
The materials engineer might ponder, alone or in consultation with others,
alternatives for any individual part or material necessary to the bike’s func-
tioning. She might take notes, draw and scribble about connections, or make
mock-up prototypes.
In another comparable scenario, a pizza maker might follow a dough rec-
ipe several times before making a change to an essential component, such as
trying a new oil or yeast or flour, or perhaps modifying resting time or the
kneading process. The ingredients and process are both built up intricately
and periodically unbuilt to ensure great familiarity with how things work.
Writing researchers frequently read, study, and consult sources as a way to
stay apprised of new knowledge as well as long-established histories relevant
to their questions. Sources are tremendously important among the materials
writing researchers work with.
The reason researchers cite sources is simple: to establish credibility—build
their ethos—writers have to show that they are members of their academic
communities. They do this by pointing to other writers who have had, and are
having, the research conversation they are interested in joining. You’ll notice
as you read any academic article that it usually begins with a literature review,
or a synthesis of sources that shows explicitly that the writer knows the main
arguments, or critical conversation, circulating about a particular topic and is

41
 42 Chapter 3

then able to carve out a space for their own research question. But what can
citing sources do for you? Here are some possibilities:
• It recognizes the history of how sources build on each other by re-
lating new research to past research (homage; timeliness of current
research).
• It lends credibility to the author—you!—who, by referencing sourc-
es, demonstrates care, ethics, rigor, and knowledge (authority;
credibility).
• It revisits claims, data, and key concepts that serve as a foundation to
the new research (build-up).
• It positions new research in relationship to the research gaps that it
highlights (differentiation).
It’s not enough, in working with a topic—say, climate change—to simply
know it is of interest to a variety of scholars. A writer needs to become fa-
miliar with the key terms used by the scholarly community working on cli-
mate research, such as greenhouse gas and carbon threshold, and the historic
data that is fundamental to that research. This might be represented by, for
example, how the measurements of carbon levels in the atmosphere that
have been taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
at the Moana Loa Observatory since 1958 led to noticing that we have sur-
passed the 400 PPM, or parts per million, carbon threshold that is key to
human thinking about climate change. Learning these things allows you to
write your way into a complex topic and shows that you know enough to
join the conversation.
But how do you begin? This chapter helps you begin to invent ideas by
engaging deeply with sources. Seeking and finding appropriate sources and
knowing them well enough to incorporate them into your writing is slow
work. It can be especially slowed down when you are at the beginning, find-
ing your way into an unfamiliar conversation for the first time. It takes time
to trace even a sample of the relations that reach through and across sources.
In this chapter, we focus on one way that you can work with a text, or
source, through working with the webs of relationships that extend out
from it, or its web of connections with other sources. We call this kind of
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 43

working with multiple texts sourcework, and it can show itself in a variety
of ways—often through library research, keyword searches, paging through
a source’s bibliography or Works Cited page, or following a trail of online
links or even a hunch about a key idea. Yet sourcework takes time, and that’s
something many student writers don’t have a lot of when they are trying
to navigate a complex topic and key details of a nuanced argument—all
from one source! Given the time it takes to work with sources effectively,
here we introduce you to a method of sourcework that we call worknets, a
four-part model of working your way through one source such that it leads
you towards other sources and ideas that will be useful to the thinking and
framing of your project.

The Power of Worknets

Worknets give us a visual model for understanding how sources interrelate,
how key words and ideas become attached to certain people, and why prov-
enance—when something was written and where it came from—matters. At
the center of any worknet is the source that you or your instructor sees as fo-
cal to the conversations happening in your research. Radiating outward from
that source, as spokes from a wheel, are what we call nodal connections. Each
nodal connection gives you another research path to follow and another way
to connect with your source more deeply and less superficially. Often students
are called upon to “incorporate five or seven or x sources” as though this is a
quick and easy task—it isn’t! But when you can treat a central source as one
that leads you in a series of directions, each with its own path toward another
source, concept, person, or event, you are more likely to read the whole thing.
This will help you understand sources more fully, investigate what you don’t
understand, and more easily locate another source. It will also help you gather
sources together and see how they connect to each other and what gaps in the
sources emerge, which helps you piece together a literature review with your
research question front and center.
Worknets provide you with a method for working within and across aca-
demic sources. As a way of helping you “invent” what you have to say, worknets
 44 Chapter 3

are a source-based way of helping you to generate a path for your research
In terms of delivery,
that points you toward a particular question, gap, or needed extension of
a complete worknet
what has come before. A finished worknet consists of four phases: a semantic
project can stand
alone, it can serve as phase, which looks at significant words and phrases repeated in the text; a
a useful building block bibliographic phase, which connects your central or focal source to the other
for an annotation that works the author has cited in her piece; an affinity phase, which shows how
is part of a larger an- personal relationships shape sourcework; and a choric phase, which allows
notated bibliography, researchers to freely associate historic and sociocultural connections to the
or it can function as central source text.* After developing a finished worknet, which involves all
a starting point for a four phases placed visually together, you will have many openings for further
literature review.

Try This: Summarizing a Central Source (1 hour)

Return to the research proposal that you generated in Chapter 1 or “Making an Argument for Your
Research” in Chapter 2. Spend some time coming up with key terms or phrases that succinctly cap-
ture your research interests, practicing with Boolean operators such as and, or, and not (e.g., “trees
and diseases and campus”; “texting or IM and depression”; “composition and grades not music”).
Begin with your library’s databases in your major and, using these key terms, start narrowing your
search to academic articles (rather than reviews, newspaper articles, or web pages, for example)
using these key terms. Skim at least five sources as you look for your central source, taking notes on
the following:
• What is the purpose of the research article?
• What methods did the researchers use to answer their research question?
• What did the researchers find out?
• What is the significance of the research?
• What research still needs to be done?
Taking these notes will allow you to see if the source you’ve read really connects with your curiosities
and research direction. They also clearly lay out the basis of most academic articles: a hypothesis (the
research question), methods (the tools used to answer a research question), results (what you found
out), and discussion (why it matters). Putting these together in 50-100 words allows you to generate a
summary of the key points of an academic article, letting you select the article that is the most inter-
esting and central to your research question to begin your worknets.
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 45

research, and you will have gained a handle on the central source such that in-
corporating it into your writing via direct quotation, paraphrase, or summary
is easier for you to achieve and more interesting for an audience to read. Wor-
knets can follow the proposal you developed in Chapter 1, or they can offer
you a method for reading sources that supports your drafting and refining a
research focus and related proposal.
To develop a worknet, begin by selecting a researched academic article
published since 1980.* This date may seem arbitrary, but we consider it a turn-
ing point because major citation systems shifted in the 1980s from numbered
annotations to alphabetically ordered lists of references or works cited. As you
read the article you select, you will, in four distinct but complementary ways,
focus on a different dimension of the source’s web of meaning, one at a time.
Worknets typically pair a visual model and a written account that discusses
the elements featured in the visual model. For the guiding examples that fol-
low, we have developed visual diagrams using Dana Driscoll’s “Introduction to
Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and Interviews,” published in 2011.
Driscoll explains in her article the differences between primary and second-
ary research, details types of qualitative research methods, and provides stu-
dent examples of research projects to help readers conceptualize her advice
about conducting primary research. Because her article ties so closely to what
this book is about—research methods—we’ve selected it as a central source to
model the worknets process.
Keywords are
increasingly im-
Phase 1: Semantic Worknet— portant as part of
What Do Words Mean? knowledge-making. In
published academic
When creating a semantic worknet (Figure 3.1), you pay attention to words articles, keywords are
and phrases that are repeated throughout the central source (“semantics” is tracked and collected
the study of meaning in words). Because academic writers repeat and return so that we can easily
to concepts that they want readers to remember, by repetition we begin to un- find them through on-
line database search-
derstand the idea of a keyword or keyphrase*—those words and phrases that
es, telling us what
are doing the work of advancing a source’s central ideas. By noticing these key
central idea an article
words and phrases, we understand first where they come from and how they is forwarding.
have been initiated and second how they are being used to create a common
 46 Chapter 3

Figure 3.1. A semantic worknet. A center node identifies the article

author and brief title. Five radiating nodes show frequently used two-
word phrases, followed in parentheses by the number of times the phrase
appeared: primary research (39), research question (13), research
project (8), ethical considerations (6), and secondary research (6).

understanding between members of a particular academic discipline, commu-

nity, or group of specialists. Although such keywords and phrases can at first
seem inaccessible, strange, or confusing, noticing them and investigating their
meaning is a sure way to begin grasping what the article is about, what knowl-
edge it advances, and the audiences and purposes it aspires to reach.
There are several different ways to come up with a list of keywords and
phrases. One approach is to manually circle or underline words and phrases
as you read, noting them as they appear and re-appear in the text so you can
return to them later. Other approaches make use of free online tools, such as
TagCrowd (tagcrowd.com/), where you can copy and paste the text of the ar-
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 47

ticle and initiate a computer-assisted process that will yield a concordance,

or a list of words and the number of times they appear in the text. NGram
Analyzer (guidetodatamining.com/ngramAnalyzer/) is another effective
tool for processing a text into a list of its one-, two-, and three-word phrases.
Across multiple sources, beginning to find words and phrases that match
up will help you locate key concepts for the literature review section of your
research project.
A semantic worknet also helps you understand specialized vocabulary on
your own terms, acting as a gateway into the terminology in the article. No-
ticing these words and phrases is a first step toward learning what the words
and phrases mean. In Figure 3.1, you will see arrows extending outward from
each term, radiating toward the edge of the image. This minor detail is a
crucial feature of the worknet. It says that there is more, a deeper expanse
beyond this article. That is, it suggests the generative reach of the words and
phrases stemming from the article. Clearly an echo of the title, the phrase
“primary research” appears in Driscoll’s article 39 times, three times more
than the next phrase, “research question,” at 13. The article differentiates pri-
mary and secondary research. These keywords and phrases remind us of
this. But the article also repeats the phrase “research project” and “ethical

Try This: Finding Keywords (30 minutes)

You’ve chosen an article you consider to be interesting and relevant to your emerging research question.
In anticipation of developing the semantic phase, spend time analyzing the article by doing the following:
• Read through the article, noting the title and any headings. Make a list of words that you find
central to the text.
• Does the article provide a list of keywords at the beginning? If so, do any of them surprise you
or differ from what you would have selected? Which ones overlap with the ones you compiled
during your reading?
• Choose some of the keywords you’ve identified from the list supplied by the article or from
the list you have generated. Next, without looking up any of the terms in the article or in any
dictionary, attempt to write brief definitions of these terms. What does each keyword mean?
Note with a star those terms you believe to be highly specialized.
 48 Chapter 3

considerations.” Each of these repeated keywords and phrases are included

in the worknet.
After creating your worknet, we encourage you to create a 300-500 word
written accompaniment of the visual worknet, based on the questions in the
next “Try This,” that helps you think through the “why” of the source’s key-
words and phrases. The notes you take as a part of the semantic worknet will
not only give you a greater understanding of the central source you’ve read,
but will also link to others in the conversation, giving you a fuller body of
sources from which to orient your research proposal or project.
In addition to providing insight into the article, the family of ideas it ad-
vances, and the disciplinary orientation of the inquiry, noticing keywords
and phrases can also inform further research, providing search terms rel-
evant for exploring and locating related sources. It can lead you toward
examining why an article covers some things with more repetition (in
Driscoll’s example, ethics), but not others (for example, finances and how
they relate to ethical choices). When gaps appear between what a source
says and does not say, those gaps are interesting places to orient your own
research question.

Try This: Developing your Semantic Worknet (1-2 hours)

Select three to five keywords and develop the visual model demonstrated in Figure 3.1. After adding
the appropriate nodes to the diagram, in 300-500 words, develop a critical reflection on your selected
visual semantic worknet, using the following questions to guide you:
• What does each word or phrase mean, generally? What do they mean in the context of this
specific article?
• Does the author provide definitions of the terms? More than one definition for each term?
Are there examples in the article that illustrate more richly what the words or phrases do, how
they work, or what they look like?
• Who uses these phrases, other than the author? For example, who are the people in the
world who already know what “primary research” refers to? What kind of work do they do?
Why?
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 49

Phase 2: Bibliographic Worknet—How do

Sources Intersect and Draw from Each Other?
In the second phase of working with your central article, we ask you to inves-
tigate its bibliography*—the list of sources that the author of your article has To notice a source
in a bibliography and
paraphrased, quoted, and summarized—by selecting, finding, and skimming
then to retrieve it
or reading sources from the bibliography. (Bibliographies are located at the and to read it can
end of research articles; they may be titled “Works Cited,” “References,” or bloom into a research
“Bibliography,” depending on the documentation style.) You can choose any trajectory before
source that is found in the back matter, footnotes, or endnotes of your focal unforeseen.
article to work with, and we recommend beginning with five or so. You might
select the most significant sources—the ones that the author cited most fre-
quently or drew from extensively—or you might simply select the ones that
are most interesting to you. Either approach will be useful—they’ll just yield
different results. Attention to a source’s bibliography is a way to begin tracing
how sources use other sources to make their arguments. When we pay close
attention to bibliographic references, we begin to see the links we might make
1) between keywords and phrases and a bibliography or Works Cited page and
2) between a central author and the sources with which they work. We begin
to see that ideas don’t just happen—they are connected to ideas that came be-
fore them. This foregrounds the interconnection of the article’s main ideas and
sources it draws upon, shedding light on the many ways in which academic
research builds upon precedents by extending, challenging, and re-engaging
historical texts.
Developing a bibliographic worknet like the one in Figure 3.2 calls atten-
tion to choices the author has made to invoke specific writers and researchers
and their work in the article. It tells of a deeper and thicker entanglement, a
web whose filaments extend beyond the obvious references into work that has
gone before, sometimes recently, sometimes long before. By involving sources
in the article, the author orients what are oftentimes central ideas while also
associating those ideas (via the sources) with tangible, identifiable, and (some-
times) accessible precedents. This step is like the development of an annotated
bibliography, or a list of sources relevant to a research project that include brief
notes about the significance of a source to a wider conversation. An annotat-
 50 Chapter 3

Figure 3.2. A bibliographic worknet added to Figure 3.1, the semantic

worknet. The center node continues to refer to the article author and
brief title. Five radiating nodes show short-form references to a small
sample of sources cited in the article: Earl Babbie, Social Research; John
Creswell, Research Design; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species; Lauer and
Asher, Composition Research; and Margaret Mead, Growing Up.

ed bibliography provides an invaluable intermediate step toward developing a

literature review.
In a journal article, the sources an author cites are listed at the end of the
article. Their position implies secondary relevance. And yet the references list
is an invaluable resource for further tracing and for discovering, by follow-
ing specific references back into the article, just how unevenly the sources be-
come involved in the article. That is, a references list makes sources appear
flat and equal, but among the sources listed, it is common to find that only a
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 51

quarter of them (or even less, sometimes) figure in substantial and sustained
ways throughout the article. Many others are light, passing gestures. The bib-
liographic worknet can help you differentiate between the two and begin to
notice which sources loom large and which are but briefly invoked.
Reading along and across the sources cited is akin to following leads and
accepting invitations to further inquiry, formulating new or more nuanced
research questions, and discovering influences that are intertwined, eclectic,
and complementary. Finding a source and reading it alongside your focus ar-
ticle, too, can yield insights into the highly specific and situated ways writers
use sources. For example, if you’re researching climate change and just read a
paraphrase or a brief quote from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-
ministration at the Mauna Loa Observatory’s 1958 data, you’ll only have a part
of the story. However, if you find that data and read it yourself, you might find
that there are different parts of the data that you think are important to high-
light. You might have a different perspective on the research, or you might find
that you better understand the original article that led you to this text. Either

Try This: Developing Your Bibliographic Worknet (1-2 hours)

After adding the appropriate nodes to your diagram (as in Figure 3.2), in 300-500 words, develop
a critical reflection on your selected visual bibliographic worknet, using the following questions to
guide you:
• Which of these sources are available in the library? Which are available online?
• What is the average age of the sources? What might the date of the sources say about the
timeliness of the article? What is the oldest source? Which is most recent?
• Are there sources that are inaccessible or out of circulation? How did the author locate such
sources in the first place?
• How did the focus article use or incorporate the source materials? Were they glossed or brief-
ly mentioned? Were large parts summarized into thin paraphrases? Were the whole of the
works mentioned or just key ideas?
• Which of the sources, judging by its title, is most likely to cite other sources in the list? Which
is least likely?
 52 Chapter 3

Try This: Developing a Rapid Prototype (30 minutes)

Before we go farther, let’s pause and try this out. Notice that the first two phases of developing a
worknet are concerned with things you will find in the source—keywords and phrases and sources
cited. Work with any text you choose (an assigned reading for this class or another class or a source
you can access quickly) to develop a rapid prototype, a swiftly hand-sketched radial diagram focusing
only on the first two phases. You could share the diagram with someone who has read the same source
and compare your radiating terms and citations. You could write about one or two of the terms or
citations to anticipate their relevance to your emerging project. Or you could write about (or discuss)
what the presence or absence of selected terms or sources says about the source you’ve chosen.
And/Or,Try This: Investigating Lists of Sources (1 hour)
Works cited or references lists may appear to be simple and flat add-ons at the end of an article or
book, but we regard them to be rich resources for thinking carefully about a writer’s choices. Look
again at the works cited or references list for your chosen article, this time with an interest in coding
and sorting it. This means you will look at the references list with the following questions to guide you:
• How recent are the sources in the list? Plot them onto a timeline to indicate the year of publi-
cation from oldest to newest. Which decade do most of the resources come from?
• How many of the sources are single-authored? How many are co-authored? How many are au-
thored by organizations, companies, or other non-human entities (i.e., not by named human
authors)?
• How many of the sources come from books? How many from journals? How many are avail-
able only online? How many are published open access?
• Ethical citation practices include awareness of the kind of voices represented through the
works you’ve consulted. Given that you can only know so much about an author through
a quick google search, consider what voices are included. Which voices are amplified, and
which are missing altogether? You might consider developing a coding pattern to highlight
the ways in which the authors represented identify in regard to gender, race, and ethnicity.
Such an effort is fraught, yet it can begin to highlight patterns important for readers of sources
to understand who is and is not being cited.
Among these patterns, which are significant for understanding the article, its authorship, or the con-
texts from which it was developed? What can you tell about the discipline or about the citation system
based on coding the works cited or references list as you have?
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 53

way, your understanding of the original article, the larger research area, and
the intersection between the two sources will deepen.
To create a bibliographic worknet, begin by reading the references list,
footnotes, and endnotes and highlighting the sources that pique your curi-
osity. Once you’ve sampled from the list, take your sources to your library
database to see what you can find. Try to locate three to five other sources
from the bibliography, noting to yourself how difficult or easy these sources
were to find. Once you’ve located your bibliographic sources, take a look at
the pages that your central source cited and how the ideas on those pages
were used in the focal source. Put the borrowed idea in context and try to
figure out how and why your central source chose the bibliographic source to
work with. Sampling from a bibliography, whether purposeful or random, can
lead to promising new questions and promising new sources that can inform,
guide, and shape your research questions. When you compose a 300-500 word
written accompaniment of the bibliographic worknet, it is in service to think- Believe it or not, a
ing through where sources come from, how history marks sourcework, how references list is a
findable sources really are, and how authors use other sources to create their gift from an author
key arguments.* to a reader and an
By the time you’ve collected three to five sources for your bibliographic invitation to follow
worknet and noted some emergent key terms from your semantic worknet, paths of inquiry that
are already well begun
you will be in good shape to begin to chart the major ideas, patterns, and dis-
and often many years
tinctions among a group of sources. This will help you determine which sourc-
in motion.
es hang together with a kind of “idea glue” that may help you, as a researcher,
figure out which sources best frame your research question and which sources
are less important in framing your research direction—this is how literature
reviews begin to develop.

Phase 3: Affinity Worknet—How

Are Writers Connected?
In the third worknet phase, you pay attention to ties, connections, and re-
lationships—affinities—between the central article’s author and others in the
research field you are exploring. An affinity worknet takes into account where
 54 Chapter 3

Figure 3.3. An affinity worknet (third phase), added to Figures 3.1 and
3.2. In this phase, four new nodes extend from the center, reflecting ties,
connections, and relationships to the author: Adrienne Jankins, Reader
for Dissertation; Linda Bergmann, Dissertation Director; Indiana U of
PA, Current Appointment; and Sherry Wynn-Perdue, Collaborator.
the author has worked, what sorts of other projects she has taken up, and
whom she has learned from, worked alongside, mentored, and taught. Many
other authors are continuing research related to the article you have read. They
are also keeping the company of people who do related work, whose research
may complement or add perspective to the issues addressed in the article. You
can see these relationships illustrated in the affinity worknet for our sample
article in Figure 3.3.
As distinct from the first (semantic) and second (bibliographic) phases,
the affinity worknet moves beyond the text and citations in the article; it is
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 55

informed by activity and relationships in the world that may not be evident
in the article itself. It begins to explore insights into an author’s career and
the interests that have shaped it. The focal article, for example, may bear close
resemblance to other projects the author has worked on. Or her profession-
al experience may suggest interplay among work history, current workplace
responsibilities, and intellectual curiosities. Further, the people authors learn
from and mentor are interconnected, participating in what is sometimes called
an invisible college,* or a network of relations that operate powerfully and
with varying degrees of formality and that influence the behind-the-scenes For example, if you
ways knowledge circulates throughout and across academic disciplines. The research the three
affinity worknet traces provisionally some of the shape of the collectives that authors of this text,
have been a part of the author’s work life. When you trace these relationships, you’ll find that they
you’ll find that you have a much larger pile of sources to work from and direc- have all co-authored
tions for your work to follow—research centers, university programs, online other projects
forums, conference presentations, and multi-authored collaborations. As you together, worked at
compose a 300-500 word written record of the affinity worknet, you’ll get a the same institutions
sense that academic writers don’t emerge suddenly from isolation to compose at times, and collab-
orated on research
rigorous work. Instead, they—like you—are real people, with real friends, col-
presentations.
leagues, institutions, and collaborative relationships that sustain them. All of
those relationships are also places that you might look to in order to orient
your research project, as they offer you a glimpse into where your thinking
comes from, how it is sustained, and where it gathers in space.

Try This Together: Where Can I Find Affinities? (30 minutes)

Among the central premises in the affinity phase is that we can learn something about a writing re-
searcher by noticing the company they keep. That is, by looking into professional and social relation-
ships that have operated in their lives, we can begin to understand the larger systems of which their
ideas—and their research commitments—are a part.
To treat this as its own research question would be to ask the following: What kinds of relationships
can we learn about and by what means can we learn about them? Certainly simple Google searches
may provide a start, but where else might you look? Work with a partner to generate a list of possible
leads—platforms or social media venues where you might check to find out more about the lead au-
thor of the article you’ve chosen to work with.
 56 Chapter 3

Where can you find information about an author’s affinities? A Google

search for the author’s name may lead you to an updated and readily avail-
able curriculum vitae, which is like an academic resume. Such a search might
also lead to the author’s social media activity (Facebook or Twitter accounts)
In fact, if you consid-
or to a professional web site that provides additional details about collabo-
er their overlapping
affinity networks, you rations and relationships. For perspective on intellectual genealogy related
might more easily to a doctoral dissertation, you can turn to your library’s database resources
understand how this page and look into ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, which indexes
book came to be, information about major graduate projects and the people who participat-
how their collabora- ed on related committees. This lead can yield insight not only into who the
tions and individual author is and how she is connected to others but also into where an author’s
projects over the last work comes from in the earliest stages of her career. You’ll finish the affinity
decade or so coalesce worknet having both a larger repertoire of research strategies and a wealth
in an interest in re-
of people and places to lead you to other sources that you might not have
search methods and,
otherwise thought of.*
in particular, explicit
discussion of such Finding these affinities will also help you hone your research skills, allow-
methods with under- ing you to see that lives and connections can be traced through sources other
graduate students. than traditional library databases.

Try This: Writing about Your Affinity Worknet (1-2 hours)

After adding the appropriate nodes to the diagram (as in Figure 3.3), in 300-500 words, develop a
critical reflection on your selected visual affinity worknet, using the following questions to guide you:
• What other kinds of work has this author written? When? For what audiences and purposes?
• Does the article in question bear resemblance to their other research? Does it seem to inform
or influence their teaching or other responsibilities?
• Who has the author collaborated with on articles or on grants? What are the research inter-
ests and primary disciplines of these collaborators?
• Does the author appear to be active in online conversations? Where, and what do these in-
teractions appear focused on? Are they professional and research-related or more casual and
social?
• Where did the author study? With whom? What might be some of the ways these places and
people influenced the author?
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 57

Phase 4: Choric Worknet—How Is Research

Rhetorically Situated in the World?
With the fourth phase, worknets grow curioser, adding to the mix what we
identify as choric elements. Choric elements take into account the time and
place in which the article was produced. Choric worknets gather referenc-
es to popular culture, world news, or the peculiarities and happenings that
coincided with the article’s being published. The term choric comes from
the Greek, khôra, the wild, open surrounds as yet-unmapped and outside
the town’s street grid and infrastructure. Notice, too, the word’s associations
with chorus, or surrounding voices. With this in mind, we regard the choric
worknet as exploratory and playful, engaging at the edges so that readers
might wander just a bit. Sometimes our best ideas are those that seem, at first
glance, to be farfetched.
Compared to the other phases, the choric worknet orbits in wider and
weirder circles, drifting into uncharted and therefore potentially inventive
linkages. Considering the time and place in which an article was written
helps bring us as readers to that time and place. Venturing into the coinci-
dental surrounds can lead to eureka moments, inspiring clicks of insight, cu-
riosity, and possibility, but it can also prove to be too far flung, too peculiar
to be useful. This is one of the lessons of research: sometimes we spend time
on what we think will be useful, but as any Googler-down-the-rabbit-hole-
of-YouTube knows, sometimes what we think will be useful isn’t. Yet it is in
the trying that we learn how to weed out as well as how to hold close what is
exciting, original, and odd.
This phase encourages you to find those rabbit holes, if only for a mo-
ment. Begin with the year your focal article was published, where the author
wrote it, and begin an online search, paying attention to what was happening
in the world that year. Follow your hunches, your interests, and even the
ways that what you’ve found in the other worknet phases maps on to where
your meandering is going. Look at Figure 3.4 and you will see five chor-
ic nodes. Their selection came from 30 minutes of online searches related
to 2011, primarily, and also a few related to Southeast Michigan, Detroit,
and Oakland University, the university where Dana Driscoll worked when
 58 Chapter 3

Figure 3.4. A choric worknet (fourth phase), added to Figure 3.3.

The center node continues to refer to the article author and brief
title. Five radiating nodes refer to events that happened in 2011:
“Honey Badger” video goes viral, IBM’s Watson defeats Ken Jennings,
Occupy Wall Street protests erupt, Oprah Winfrey Show airs final
episode, and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” was the top pop song.

she wrote the article. Each of the five nodes reflects your choice, something
note-worthy or intriguing.
The choices you make in creating the nodes can spark the beginnings of
researchable questions and may be reflected in your 300-500 word account
of the choric worknet. For example, the node for the “Honey Badger” video
going viral as it coincides with Driscoll’s article on primary research methods
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 59

might instigate research questions concerning just what kind of researched

claims the video makes, the relationship of video to writing, and the edge of
seriousness and playfulness in composing research that will circulate public-
ly. This element in the choric worknet, although it at first may seem trivial,
can also pique curiosity and invite inquiries into what animals know or into
their biology and ecology, such as in the This American Life podcast episode,
“Becoming a Badger.” For any student who began reading their focal article
with few ideas about their own research path, the choric phase will give you
an abundance of options to test and play with the limits and openings of a
research project.
Given the messiness of invention—its combinations of purpose and di-
gression, insight and failure, getting lost and then deciding on a direction—
the choric worknet stands as the most wide open, potentially the richest of
the four phases, even as it risks being the most wasteful, inviting oddball and
offbeat ties. Such ties, however, situate the article in the wider world, and they
do so while also honoring the place you stand as a researcher, tapping into the
interests and curiosities that compel you most.

Try This: Writing about Your Choric Worknet (1-2 hours)

After adding the appropriate nodes to the diagram, in 300-500 words, develop a critical reflection on
your selected visual choric worknet, using the following questions to guide you:
• What was happening in the wider world coincident with the time and place of the focal arti-
cle’s being written and published?
• Why have you selected the assortment of nodes you have? How did you find them? What
about them compelled you to add them to the worknet?
• Where do you locate possibilities for further exploration and for emerging interests at the
juncture of any choric node and any other node in the radial diagram?
• Which of the choric nodes is most relevant, in your view? Which is least?
• Are there choric nodes you thought about including but later abandoned? What motivated
you to make such choices?
 60 Chapter 3

Branching Out—Taking
Worknets Farther
With the four phases completed, as in Figure 3.5, the worknet introduces initial,
inventive branchings, a web of filaments, or trails, that invite further inquiry and
that may prime further questions. When experienced researchers read scholarly
sources, they usually do so to support, reinforce, or clarify claims they have al-
ready begun to formulate. In early stages of research, however, reading scholarly
sources oftentimes yields more questions, and these questions each set up further
inquiry. Worknets position scholarly sources as resources for invention, and after

Figure 3.5. A finalized four-phase worknet. The worknet primes yet more questions
from each peripheral node. Each node may prompt associations that motivate
database searches, online lookups, or ideas for promising new directions.
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 61

developing all four phases, you will begin to see that you have many more options
When we write with
for expanding your emerging interests than you initially realized. This approach copious questions—
resonates with the idea of copia,* or lists of possibilities, which suggests that hav- just as worknets
ing more than you need to continue research is a wonderful place to be. provide—we rarely
While a single worknet can engage us with new ideas entangled in a web of run out of things to
relationships extending from an article, a series of worknets—that is, worknets say. Allowing for this
applied to two or three or more related articles—can form the foundation for a wandering helps us
think more abundant-
substantial backdrop to a research project. In fact, a compilation of worknets pro-
ly about what there
vides you with the basis of a literature review, that portion of a researched project is to say on a topic,
that provides orientation to established research related to your area of inquiry. what is still unknown,
and how we can
follow the research
Really Getting to Know Your Sources paths that most ignite
Worknets provide a stepwise process to get to know your sources. The better our passions.
known and better read the sources, the more nuanced and precise will be the lit-
erature review that emerges from your work with them. Certainly there are oth-
er intermediate note-keeping options and less involved approaches to the phases
presented in this chapter. For example, an annotated bibliography might require
you to gather and write brief summaries of related sources, focusing on the rele-
vance of the source to your research question. Whether you take up the method
we introduce and produce a full, complete worknet for one source, or whether
you apply selections of the phases to one or more articles, perhaps adapting by
writing annotations or sketching worknets by hand, the approach introduced
here will help shape your own work.

Try This: Finding Connections, Near and Far (30 minutes)

The choric nodes are the most likely to introduce variety and surprise. They fan out the article’s web
of relations, finding (possible) connections that may hint at new or slightly altered researchable ques-
tions. After you develop the choric phase of the worknet for your chosen article, identify both the node
you consider to be most related and the node you consider to be least related. Write for five minutes
on each node, accounting for why you think it to be more or less related. What do each of these nodes
indicate about the world from which the article emerged? What do each of these nodes say about what
you find interesting or about your own curiosities in this context?
 62 Chapter 3

Modeling Worknets
We have seen students do distinctive, innovative work with worknets, and
we’re spotlighting one such example to give you an idea of what is possible.
One undergraduate student at Virginia Tech applied all four phases to a 2015
article by Armond Towns, “That Camera Won’t Save You! The Spectacular
Consumption of Police Violence.” The article discusses issues related to body
cameras, social justice, police violence, and the presumed security bestowed
on technological devices. In this case, the worknet followed the steps intro-
duced in this article, culminating in all four phases layered into Figure 3.6.
Additionally, the student was invited to translate the visual and textual wor-
knet into a 3D model, using materials from a local art supply store. The model
materialized the worknet as a physical sculpture, conveying more fully an un-
derstanding of the article as entangled with the words, sources, relationships,

Figure 3.6. A sample worknet created by Alonda Johnson.

Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 63

and time-place coincidences of the moment in which it was produced. Figure

3.7 shows the potential of extending the worknet one step farther by creating a
model whose dimensions and materials exceed the page or the screen.

Figure 3.7. A three-dimensional, material model of the

sample worknet created by Alonda Johnson.
 64 Chapter 3

Using Worknets to Develop

a Literature Review
Although literature reviews serve different purposes from discipline to dis-
cipline and vary in scope from one project to another, they have in common
the purpose of orienting readers to relevant scholarship. Literature reviews
provide a synthesis, or glancing overview, that weaves together relevant focus-
es and acknowledges limitations, or knowledge gaps, in the series of sources
gathered in the review. By the time you’ve finalized a worknet, you will have
read and skimmed at least ten sources around a common research theme and
question that interests you. Looking again, consider some of the ways specific
worknet phases can support your development of a literature review:
• Semantic worknet (phase 1): How are specific keywords and phras-
es used differently from one source to another? How do different
keywords and phrases across a selection of sources suggest yet more
refined possibilities for impactful terms not yet introduced in the
sources gathered?
• Bibliographic worknet (phase 2): How do the articles you have
collected respond to common sources? What can be said about each
article’s timeliness based on the ages of the sources it consults?
• Affinity worknet (phase 3): How do connections with other people or
institutions reveal the priorities of the authors of your sources? What
can you discern about the relationship of each article to an academic
discipline?
• Choric worknet (phase 4): What is the relationship of each article to
contemporary events? How might those events have influenced its
message?
With a series of worknets built from different but related sources, you have
carried out a generative, robust method for assembling, annotating, and inter-
weaving sources. Literature reviews require thoughtful balancing of sources,
making reference to sources so they are represented concisely and fairly. Wor-
knets, for the practice they give you with moving in and out of texts, support the
development of effective literature reviews.
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 65

Focus on Delivery: Writing

a Literature Review
A literature review is a synthesized grouping of academic sources that have
been chosen to frame a larger piece of research and that relate to a research
question a writer is pursuing. Some literature reviews are stand-alone pieces
to say “this is what’s out there on a particular topic.” Most literature reviews are
front matter for larger academic papers. The scope of your project will deter-
mine how many sources go into your literature review.
By “literature,” we mean academic scholarship chosen about a certain topic
that helps to answer a particular research question. By “review,” we mean a
summary of the literature’s argument and an explanation of its connection to
the other sources that you use.
To write a literature review, complete these steps:
1. Locate five to ten sources that you think would be useful for under-
standing the research question.
2. Skim these sources.
3. If the source is relevant to your research question, read it fully and
annotate it, writing a 100-word summary of the source in your own
words. Read the source’s bibliography to add relevant sources you find
there to your working source list.
4. Discard irrelevant sources and locate ones that are more specific to
your research question. Annotate all relevant sources.
5. Read your 100-word summaries and try to figure out how they go
together. What are their common features, key words, and theoretical
frameworks? What year were they written? Could sources be grouped
historically, theoretically, or thematically?
6. Use your worknets to help you group your sources in different ways in
order to see patterns between and among your sources:
a. What similar ideas and words are used to discuss major ideas
in your research area among your sources? How do they differ?
(semantic)
 66 Chapter 3

b. What changes when you move your sources into chronological or-
der from earliest to latest or latest to most recent? (bibliographic)
c. What happens when you group sources by relationships between
and among sources? (affinity)
d. Would your review benefit from adding historical and cultural
context? (choric)
5. Consider how these sources together lead up to your research ques-
tion. Why is it important, timely, and relevant to previous research?
6. Revise your annotations and put them together in such a way that
the connections between them are clear and the connections to your
research question are visible.
What’s important for you to know about literature reviews is that the
choices about what sources to use and what makes them go together are
not immediately clear for a reader, which means part of writing a literature
review is including that rationale within the review itself. By reading your
literature review, your audience should be able to figure out the “idea glue”
that holds all of the literature together, inclusive of your project’s purpose
and the main conversations taking place within your research area. A reader
should walk away from your literature review knowing exactly why you’ve
chosen these sources to go together, as opposed to millions of others that
could be chosen instead.

Works Cited
Driscoll, Dana L. “Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and
Interviews.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, edited by C. Lowe and P. Zem-
liansky, vol. 2, WritingSpaces.org/Parlor Press/The WAC Clearinghouse, 2011, pp.
153-74. The WAC Clearinghouse, wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/writingspaces2/
driscoll--introduction-to-primary-research.pdf.
Glass, Ira, host. “Becoming a Badger.” This American Life, episode 596, WBEZ, 9
Sept. 2016, www.thisamericanlife.org/596/becoming-a-badger.
Johnson, Alonda. “3D Model of Worknet for Armond Towns’ ‘That Camera Won’t
Save You! The Spectacular Consumption of Police Violence.’” 14 Nov. 2018.
Working with Sources: Worknets and Invention 67

ENGL1105: First-year Writing: Introduction to College Composition, Virginia

Polytechnic Institute and State University, student work.
Johnson, Alonda. “Worknet of Armond Towns’ ‘That Camera Won’t Save You! The
Spectacular Consumption of Police Violence.’” 14 Nov. 2018. ENGL1105: First-year
Writing: Introduction to College Composition, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University, student work.
Towns, Armond R. “That Camera Won’t Save You! The Spectacular Consumption of
Police Violence.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015,
www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-5/that-camera-wont-save-you-the-spectac-
ular-consumption-of-police-violence/.
“Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases, NOAA
Global Monitoring Laboratory, 5 Oct. 2021, gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/.
Chapter 4. Working With Words
Writing is a technology. Writing allows us to capture otherwise ephemeral
conversations and ideas, to put words down on paper. Current concerns about
technology echo the original complaints (circa fifth century BCE) about writ-
ing: it makes it easier for others to cheat, it hurts our in-person relationships,
it’s not trustworthy, and it’s making us stupid. Despite these concerns (and
it’s worth analyzing these concerns to consider where they come from and
whether or not they’re fair), many of our most popular technologies continue
to change in ways that make it easier to access and capture words. For one, the
computer developed as a counting machine, which has morphed into a tool
that, among many things, allows us to consume words to our hearts’ content.
Although the telephone originally allowed us to speak to each other directly,
plenty of people never speak on their phones anymore—they just send writ-
ten messages. All of this to say: we love words, and we have access to copious
amounts of them.
Digital technologies have been a boon for researchers, since we now have
so many tools that help us find, sort, count, and analyze word patterns in dis-
cursive corpuses,* or groupings of compositions. Such treatment of words, Corpus is Latin for
in which we consider the relationship between a text and its social context, “body” (as in body
is broadly called discourse analysis, and in this chapter we will address one of work or body of
particular approach to discourse analysis that considers language in social information), which
interaction. In Chapter 3, you had the opportunity to practice word work has the same root
by developing your semantic worknet. During this phase you used content as corpse—a totally
analysis—counting words, noting their proximity to other words, and identi- different kind of body.
fying key concepts in part by their frequency and placement in the text. An-
other way to understand the relationships between words and social context is
to conduct rhetorical analysis, keying in on the rhetorical situation in which
a particular composition develops. Finally, genre analysis considers how the
particular kind of text you are examining functions like a cultural artifact,
providing clues about the context in which it developed.
All of these methods—discourse analysis, content analysis, rhetorical
analysis, and genre analysis—are ways of examining words and the detailed

69
 70 Chapter 4

stories they tell about social interaction and rhetorical contexts. These an-
alytical methods demonstrate the significance of word patterns we are able
to observe in texts all around us. Charles Antaki, Michael Billig, Derek Ed-
wards, and Jonathan Potter have worked together to suggest that the key
to success in such analyses is actually doing analysis. This may seem rather
common sense, but analysis is probably the hardest part of conducting effec-
tive research. By insisting that doing analysis means doing analysis, Antaki
and his co-authors mean that analytical tools are not equations in which you
can simply plug in a few variables and unlock a fixed meaning. They note
that analysis is not
• simply pointing out the weaknesses in someone else’s work,
• just sharing findings,
• summarizing the research, or
• stating an opinion.
Instead, analysis
• is a messy process,
• connects findings within a larger rhetorical context,
• describes significance of emergent patterns, and
• explains the “so what” component of the work to an audience.
Analysis helps us understand not just what words say but also what they
do, not just what they represent but also how they mean. Analysis is a foun-
dational activity for successful, effective research writing, and it is also the
starting place for production, design, and delivery—processes that we will
address in subsequent chapters. Delivery, in particular, is often the con-
cern with which people start—how will I write up my research? What will
it look like? What words will I use? But we encourage you to be patient.
Effective research takes time, and it can/should be messy along the way.
You can’t know what you’ll write until you have asked and answered your
research question by wholly engaging in the analysis, getting pulled into the
analysis, getting lost in the analysis! And then—when you’ve identified the
significance of your findings—turn to Chapter 8 and consider methods for
writing up your research.
Working With Words 71

Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis is a qualitative research method, and the many varieties
of discourse analysis constitute the area of research called discourse studies,
which are practiced in social science and humanities disciplines. For our pur-
poses we will focus on discourse analysis (DA) that examines language in so-
cial interaction, which includes language communicated through talk, text,
and gesture. Since our focus in this chapter is on words, we will walk through
the following steps:
1. Considering how you select a discursive corpus, a group of texts for
analysis;
2. Exploring and identifying the rhetorical situation, or the context in
which communication takes place, for the corpus; and
3. Preparing or transcribing discourse, that is, moving from discourse in
interaction—the kind of talk that might happen with a friend during
the day, in an interview setting, or on a digital platform—to written
words on a page.
After you’ve selected a corpus, explored its development, identified its rhe-
torical situation, and prepared it for analysis, then the fun really begins: tag-
ging or coding patterns in the text and interpreting findings. We’ll save these
last two steps for the end of the chapter when we’ll ask you to develop a coding
scheme for the corpus and method of analysis that you select.

Identifying a Corpus
There are lots of starting places for word work. You might already have a
research question, so you might need to identify the corresponding corpus
that will help you answer your question. Or, you might stumble upon an
interesting text or idea, and though you may have questions, your thoughts
may not have crystalized into clear research questions as yet. Wherever you
are in the process, you will have to identify a set of meaningful words, the
data that will help you answer a research question. Some examples of cor-
puses include the following:
 72 Chapter 4

• Conversation as corpus: Discourse analyst Dorothy Smith chronicles

transcribed accounts of the friends of a woman—simply referred to
as “K”—who support the suggestion that she is mentally ill. Smith
critiques both the friends’ accounts and the line of questioning that
the interviewer provides, suggesting that together they develop an
idea of “K” as mentally ill, though the facts do not necessarily support
their finding. Smith uses her analysis to demonstrate that interviews
are co-constructed and that interviewers have significant power in the
accounts they elicit.
• Digital text as corpus: Jennifer Gonzalez writes about education
on her blog, Cult of Pedagogy. She has lots of articles posted, but
some are much more popular than others, and some stir controversy.
Responsiveness to her posts can be measured, in part, by the number
of comments she receives on each post. A researcher could use the
comments on her posts, her posts alone, or these texts together as a
research corpus.
Narrowing a corpus • Social media as corpus: Recently, a student followed the Tennessee
to a specific time can Titans’ twitter feed for a month and used the entirety of their tweets
help with establishing as a corpus.* In her analysis, she was able to note how frequently the
a well-defined scope Titans tweeted, when and what they tweeted, how many times the
(e.g., one hour of con- team was retweeted or responded to, and discursive patterns in their
versation, a Twitter tweets.
hashtag across one • Print archive as corpus: You may have a stack of texts in your home,
week or one month,
library, or university that are ripe for analysis. Kate’s university was
a print archive in a
specific year).
recently gifted an incredible archive of 1500 letters written by school-
children to Holocaust survivor Nessy Marks. Her students began
digitizing and cataloging this rich archive, learning about the school-
children’s reactions to elements of Ms. Marks’ story that range from
admissions of family connections to the holocaust to demonstrations
of patriotism.
• “Homely Discourse” as corpus: Carolyn Miller has suggested that
“homely discourse” such as “the recommendation, the user manu-
al, the progress report, the ransom note, the lecture, and the white
paper, as well as the eulogy, the apologia, the inaugural, the public
Working With Words 73

proceeding, and the sermon” are all worthy of analysis (155). In fact,
“everyday” texts, such as greeting cards and menus, can be fascinating
corpuses. Paige Lenssen published her study of Enron’s “honest ser-
vices clause,” certainly homely discourse within the larger body of the
company’s corporate documents. Her work, published in the student
journal Xchanges, traces the company’s breaches of ethics before their
collapse.
In Chapter 1 we defined research as the systematic asking of questions and
congruent use of methods to learn answers to interesting, important ques-
tions. In selecting a corpus we once again encourage you to tap into your curi-
osities as a starting place for research.

Try This Together: Identifying Corpuses (30 minutes)

With a small group, follow your curiosities and select an example for each of the kinds of corpuses
listed here:
• Identify a conversation as corpus. This could be a face-to-face conversation, a video, an au-
dio recording, or a textual conversation.
• Select a digital text that you might consider for analysis. This might be a blog, journal man-
uscript, newspaper article, etc.
• Choose a social media corpus. This can come from any digital platform, but make sure
to narrow your selection such that you choose a particular thread, post, hashtag, or set of
comments. Oftentimes, social media researchers organize corpuses, or corpora, by following
designated timeframes or hashtags.
Look for a print archive. This could be an extensive personal magazine collection,
a trove of letters, or something within your university library’s holdings.
• Lastly, find some homely discourse. Look around you and find some “everyday” texts that
you might not have initially considered for analysis. These texts might be signs, posters,
forms, advertisements, cards, or similar. Sometimes the more “homely” or unexpected, the
more interesting the analysis!
As you search for these various corpuses, take particular note of how you find them, what draws you
to them, and what further analysis of them might glean for you.
 74 Chapter 4

Exploring and Establishing the Context

Once you have identified an interesting corpus, harness your detective skills
and spend some time exploring. Consider the playful approach to learning
about a text that you developed in Chapter 3 when you constructed a worknet.
Draw on that same willingness to experiment and follow leads down rabbit
holes in your approach to learning about the corpus you have identified.

Taking Notes As You Go

Preparing your corpus for analysis is part of the research process, so make
note of what you find as you go. This means annotate your corpus, note your
experiences at every step along the research path, and consider these obser-
vations and annotations in your final analysis. An annotation is a short sum-
mary of work, whether a book or textual source (as in writing your literature
review), or an observational experience (like a site visit or a response to data
collection). There are lots of ways to annotate, and we encourage you to try
different methods and combine them along the way until you find what works
best for you.

Try This: Identify the Rhetorical Context of a Corpus (30 minutes)

Now that you have identified potential research spaces, return one more time to the corpus that you
find most interesting to explore it and identify its rhetorical contexts. Consider the following:
• By whom and how were the texts in the corpus developed?
• For whom and why were the texts in the corpus developed?
• What is the context in which the texts in the corpus were developed?
• When were the texts in the corpus created?
Essentially, consider the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of these texts. Then, spend some
time looking slant at the text, i.e., consider what surrounds the text—the other authors, texts, images,
and contexts that impact its uptake.
Working With Words 75

Chapter 3* Consider our discussion of the components of annota- Note taking strategies
tions. often change from
Chapter 5 Think about the steps we suggest in composing a re- one research proj-
search memo. ect to the next. We
encourage you to try
Chapter 6 Peruse our recommendations about developing an these approaches and
annotated map. to ask your class-
Lists of questions Take a page from writing teacher Michael Bunn, who mates how they take
encourages us to “Read Like Writers,” asking questions notes.
of texts before, during, and after we read them.
Double-entry journal On one side of the page make notes about your research
experiences and specific steps in your process, and on
the other side reflect on those experiences in subsequent
considerations of your data.
Research log Create a log to catalogue your responses to the text and
your initial impressions - these will be helpful when you
begin coding your corpus.
Study formal features Consider the formal aspects of the text (how long is it?
how is it structured? does it have headings or images?)
as well as your thoughts, feelings, and analyses.

Experiment with these different methods, and don’t forget the material
components of annotation. For instance, selecting a particular pen, paper,
app, or digital format for creating your annotations can usefully change your
approach to a corpus. You can record your observations and analyses on the
text itself, in a separate document, in a journal, or using audio, video, or im-
ages. You might also combine some of these modes and create a multimodal
response or annotation. There are some digital platforms that allow you to
provide audio or image tags within corpora; such practice is a great way to
start coding a selected corpus.

Preparing the Corpus for Analysis

You may have easy access to your selected corpus, and it may even be made
of digital text that is easily manipulable. If so, awesome! However, if you’re
 76 Chapter 4

working with print text that you’ll need to digitize to code more easily, or if
you’re working with an audio conversation that you’ll need to transcribe, you
may need to take some time to prepare the text for analysis. Be persistent if
you need to take this step. Preparing text for analysis is an interpretive act, and
it can be just as interesting as analysis. In fact, it may allow you a closeness to
the data that might make things easier as you begin analysis.
If you are examining print texts, you may want to copy or scan your cor-
pus and then preserve the originals. You may want to curate your archive
(see the discussion of working with archives and curating collections in
Chapter 6). Digitizing your corpus may be helpful, but it is not necessary.
You may instead want to work with print versions of your texts. Either way,
make sure that you can annotate and fully examine the corpus you’ve select-
ed without damaging the original.
If you are working with a spoken or gestural conversation, you will need
to transcribe the discourse. Transcription translates words from one mode
to another, and you can decide what level of detail you need for the work you
are doing. For instance, you may select a minimal level of detail for transcrip-
tion that simply records what has been said in a conversation. However, you
might want to capture much more—the way something has been phrased
or extratextual sounds that make up a conversation, including laughter and
sighs, emphasis, pauses, gestures, facial expressions. Analysts who practice
a version of discourse analysis called conversation analysis believe that for
analysis, you need all the components of a given conversation, so their tran-
scription is very detailed, and it might be hard to read for someone who isn’t
familiar with the method.
Many discourse analysts who study language in social interaction employ
an interim level of detail that includes text, pause, and emphasis. Figure 4.1
includes an extract of conversation between a writing consultant and a stu-
dent in the Writing Center. The number that precedes each line allows the
analyst to easily reference particular moments in the conversation for anal-
ysis. The capital letter with the colon following it indicates who is speaking,
in this case the “G” indicates the student, and the “T” indicates the tutor.
The bracket “[“ indicates overlapping speech, and the parenthesis indicates
a pause in the conversation “(.)”. The conversation is aligned so that it’s easy
Working With Words 77

to read. Such an approach to transcription makes it accessible, and the au-

dience has a fairly good idea of how the speech was delivered. The thing
is, whatever you choose to transcribe should be something you address in
analysis. So if you don’t plan to analyze facial expression, there’s no need to
transcribe facial expression.

Figure 4.1. Example of a transcribed conversation.

Try This:Transcribe a Video (60 minutes)

One of the most exciting parts of transcription is how it helps you really be attentive to words used in
interaction. What we initially notice when we listen to or watch something is so different than what we
notice upon second, third, or fourth attempts at listening/seeing. When we transform audio/gestural
data to written data, this effect is compounded. Follow these steps to try transcription for yourself:
1. Select a brief video (30 seconds is ideal!) that includes interaction between at least two people.
2. Before you transcribe, watch/listen to the video at least three times. After each viewing, take notes
about what stands out to you. How does your analysis gain detail with each subsequent viewing?
3. Now that you’re becoming more familiar with the excerpt, after your third viewing, compile all
your notes and transcribe this discourse, attempting to capture the multiple methods of commu-
nication (textual, gestural, oral) in words.
4. To effectively transcribe the interaction, you’ll need to watch or listen to it many more times.
Transcription is much easier if you can also slow down the video or audio. After you’ve completed
the transcription at the end of your third viewing, take notes about what stands out to you after
spending considerably more time with this text. How does this impression differ from the first
three viewings and your notes about the experiences? What do these differences suggest about
your relationship to the corpus, to time, and sense-making?
 78 Chapter 4

Content Analysis
Content analysis is practiced in numerous fields; it is a systematic approach to
We may be able to examining patterns in data and provides a quantitative treatment of discourse.
discern a text’s focal For instance, you might consider how many times a particular term, phrase,
concerns by notic- theme, or, more generally, code, is mentioned in a text and then analyze its
ing the words and significance to the document’s purpose or context. Returning again to the se-
phrases that repeat
mantic phase of the worknets detailed in Chapter 3, patterns surfaced through
within it. Similarly,
patterns of omission
content analysis can be useful for understanding a text or corpus you’re an-
help researchers alyzing, and it can also be insightful when applied to your own writing. In
account for underrep- both cases—applied to your own writing or to the writing of others—content
resented, downplayed, analysis helps us develop an indexical awareness.* By indexical awareness, we
or altogether ignored mean that as writers or as readers, content analysis clarifies patterns of repeti-
matters. tion and omission, or patterns of what is and is not there.

Try This: Content Analysis of a Text (60 minutes)

Use content analysis to examine your own text. Start by selecting something you have recently written.
Then, copy the text into a document or use an app that allows you to quantify the corpus (word pro-
cessing software can help you do this, as can free apps that develop word clouds and visualizations, like
Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org/), TagCrowd (tagcrowd.com/), NGram Analyzer (guidetodatamining.
com/ngramAnalyzer/), and AntConc (www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/), if you want to
get advanced. Now, spend some time analyzing the corpus:
• Identify word frequency: What are the most frequently used words in the corpus? How many
times are they mentioned?
• Identify collocation: Which words are located next to each other? How frequently are they
located next to each other?
• Consider uptake: If you’ve shared this text with others, perhaps through social media, how
many individuals have liked or shared it? What is the life of the thread? Does it change or
switch platforms?
• Identify textual patterns: How many words are in each paragraph? In each sentence?
Working With Words 79

Rhetorical Analysis
Whereas discourse analysis examines patterns, often of language in interac-
tion, and content analysis considers quantifiable, systemic patterns in dis-
course, rhetorical analysis considers the context, audience, and purpose for
discourse. Rhetorical analysis helps demonstrate the significance of a text by
carefully considering the rhetorical situation in which it develops and the ways
that it supports its purpose. There are lots of definitions of rhetoric, and the
definition that makes the most sense to you and your understanding of com-
munication will impact how you deploy rhetorical analysis. Here are a few
definitions of rhetoric:
The ancient Greek rhetor, Aristotle: “Rhetoric may be defined as the
faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
British rhetorician, I. A. Richards: “Rhetoric…should be a study of
misunderstanding and its remedies” (3).
Contemporary American rhetors, Elizabeth Wardle and Doug
Downs: “Rhetoric is a field of study in which people examine how
persuasion and communication work, and it is also the art of human
interaction, communication, and persuasion” (366).
Contemporary American genre theorist, Charles Bazerman: “The
study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human
goals and carry out human activities. . . . ultimately a practical study
offering people greater control over their symbolic activity” (6).
Rhetorical analysis helps us understand the various components that make
a communicative act/artifact successful or not. A key component to effective
rhetorical analysis is careful, active attention to what the author and her text are
trying to accomplish. Krista Ratcliffe calls such attention rhetorical listening.

Try This: Defining Rhetoric (30 minutes)

Find a few alternative definitions of rhetoric on your own, and see which one is most appealing to
you. Now, mush them together, paraphrase, and come up with a definition that resonates with your
understanding of rhetoric.
 80 Chapter 4

Most people summarize rhetorical listening as an orientation of active open-

ness toward communication, and Ratcliffe identifies multiple components for
such a stance:
• “acknowledging the existence” of the other, their self, and discourse
• “listening for (un)conscious presences, absences, and unknowns”
• purposefully “integrating this information into our world views and
decision making” (29)
Rhetorical listening often draws our attention to absences. Jacqueline Jones
Royster’s work on literacy practices, particularly of nineteenth century Black
women, demonstrates how listening for and being curious about absences of-
ten leads us to understudied rhetors. Temptaous McCoy has coined the term
amplification rhetorics (AR), a method of seeking out and amplifying rhe-
torical practices that may not have been effectively heard. She describes AR as
a way of examining and celebrating the experiences and community rhetorics
of Black and marginalized communities.

Try This: Analyzing Keywords (60 minutes)

Working with something you have recently written, assign keywords (one or two-word phrases) you
believe would do well to convey its significance (don’t count, just consider what you think is most im-
portant about the text). To do so, follow these steps:
1. Identify five to seven keywords based on your sense of the text.
2. Then, turn to a keyword generating tool, such as TagCrowd (tagcrowd.com) or the NGram Ana-
lyzer (guidetodatamining.com/ngramAnalyzer/). Copy and paste your writing into the platform
and initiate the analysis with the aid of the keyword generating tool. Which words or phrases
match (as in, you thought they were significant and they show up frequently in your text)? Which
words or phrases appear in one list but not the other? What do you think explains the differences
in the lists?
3. Next, identify two keywords or phrases you believe are not sufficiently represented in either list.
What are these keywords or phrases, and how are they significant to the work you are doing?
Develop a one-page revision memo that accounts for how you could go about expanding the pres-
ence of these underrepresented words or phrases in your writing.
Working With Words 81

Another way of thinking of rhetorical listening in the context of texts is

Peter Elbow’s practice of “The Believing Game,” in which he encourages au-
dience members to suspend potential disbelief or critique of a text. Instead
of starting with critique, he works to step into the authors’ shoes and actu-
ally believe whatever they are suggesting. Complimentary to this practice is
Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s formulation of invitational rhetoric.
They offer invitational rhetoric as counter to understandings of rhetoric as
primarily about persuasion, like Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric. They see
persuasion as ultimately about power, whereas invitational rhetoric instead
works to develop equitable relationships. Like rhetorical listening, invita-
tional rhetoric is a method for establishing understanding within relation-
ships. They define such work as “an invitation to the audience to enter the
rhetor’s world and see it as the rhetor does” (5). Although these approaches
all differ, what they have in common is using rhetorical awareness to invite
understanding rather than arguing for one’s own point of view or “winning”
an argument.

Try This: Rhetorical Analysis (60 minutes)

Practice rhetorical analysis. Select an article that interests you, perhaps one that you identified to
work with in Chapter 3 or something you came across when you searched for potential corpora at
the beginning of this chapter. Spend some time considering why this article is persuasive or appeal-
ing to you:
• Who is the audience? What evidence suggests this audience?
• What is the context in which it was written? What evidence suggests this?
• What is its purpose? You might also identify the thesis or orienting principle and consider
the larger relationship between the work’s purpose and its stated argument or principle. What
evidence leads you to this finding?
• Who is the author? Really—who is the author? Draw on your worknet findings and consider
the author’s relationship to this rhetorical situation. What is the exigency, or reason, for writ-
ing this work?
Or, you might return to considering the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of this article.
 82 Chapter 4

There are many ways to practice rhetorical analysis, although it is often

reduced to an equation rather than a tool for discovery of a text. Let rhetorical
analysis be a method that opens up understanding and possibility rather than
one that simply labels certain words or passages. Consider how identifying
a particular rhetorical appeal adds depth and nuance to a text and connects
you to it in complex ways. For instance, the previous “Try This” offered two
approaches to rhetorical analysis. The next “Try This” offers two additional ap-
proaches. Consider which one resonates most with you. Which method helps
you identify the significance and interest of a text?

Try This: More Rhetorical Analysis (60 minutes)

Working with a text/genre/corpus of your choosing, develop responses to the following prompt. If
you seek a text as the basis of your analysis, we recommend Captain Brett Crozier’s letter to shipmates
aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, which was pub-
lished by the San Francisco Chronicle (s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6939308/TR-COVID-19-
Assistance-Request.pdf).
In what ways does the author offer specific appeals to the audience? Consider particular instances
of the following appeals in the text:
• Kairos, which refers to timeliness—indications of why the text is contemporarily relevant
• Ethos, which we addressed in detail in Chapter 2, generally concerns the relative credibility of
an author or argument
• Logos, which means demonstrating specific pieces of evidence that support the text’s purpose
• Pathos, which relates to engaging the emotions
Practice rhetorical listening:
• What is not here? Are there any notable absences? Things/people/ideas the author does not
mention?
• Are there ideas or appeals that potentially challenge your acceptance of the author’s work?
Although we have asked you to identify individual appeals, such rhetorical tools usually work together,
and it can be hard to pull them apart. In identifying the various rhetorical components of a text, con-
sider how they collaborate to make a text successful and persuasive . . . or not.
Working With Words 83

Genre Analysis
Hopefully in trying out these methods you’re beginning to notice that there are
lots of overlaps. Although we’ve offered distinctions, at their core, all of these
methods are rhetorical, and they’re all discursive. They all value words and
suggest that they are meaningful, particularly when you consider them within
context. Further, you can mix and match methods to best meet your research
project. One method is termed “rhetorical analysis,” because it places the rhe-
torical moves that an author makes in the foreground. “Content analysis” is also
rhetorical, but it places a numerical accounting of certain words, phrases, or
rhetorical moves in the foreground. A final method (which is also grounded in
a rhetorical framing of language) to consider is genre analysis.* Genre is often
used as a synonym for type or kind, and most of us are used to thinking about
genre in terms of movies, music, and literature. For genre analysis, we’ll ask
you to turn your attention to the homely genres we find all around us, genres
in the wild, genres that develop because of a clear rhetorical need, or exigency.
Exigency and genre have a sort of problem and solution relationship. For ex-
ample, consider the relationships of these exigencies and genres:
Exigency Genre
You’re hungry and want to know what you can order and how Menu
much it will cost at a restaurant
It’s the beginning of the semester and you want to know what Syllabus
to expect in class
You might want to return the thing that you bought from the Receipt
store, and you need proof of purchase
You have been caught speeding, and you need to know how to Speeding Ticket In using genre analysis
pay for the penalty mindfully and con-
sistently, you work
Most of us practice genre analysis every time we compose something towards making
new. For instance, the first time that you write a resume, you probably look your writing and
at some examples, consider what seem to be the norms and expectations— research performanc-
or conventions—and then you choose how you might personalize or deviate es more consistently
from those in a way that is consistent with success in the genre. There are a successful.
 84 Chapter 4

number of things to consider when you examine a genre. First, you might
pay attention to the conventions and deviations. Then, you might consider the
particular affordances, or what the genre allows, and constraints, the things
the genre doesn’t allow. For instance, if you’re excited to go to a new restau-
rant, but it doesn’t have an online menu, you will have to go to the restaurant
to find out what your options are. A restaurant that changes their menu on a
daily basis might purposefully choose not to put their menu online because
the affordances and constraints of an online menu are such that you’ll need
to constantly change what’s there to make sure that you aren’t misleading po-
tential customers. A menu on a blackboard has the affordance of being easy to
change for immediate customers who are in the restaurant, but it’s constrained
too in that it doesn’t share menu items with potential customers outside of the
restaurant as a digital menu might.
Genre analysis can be powerful in helping us understand the work words
do in our communities. For instance, together with a student we studied
the crime notices distributed through email at our university. By looking
at seven years of these warnings, we were able to see the way that the genre
changed over time; it transformed from a simple notice to a specific warning

Try This Together: Genre Analysis (45 minutes)

With a partner, select a genre that interests you. We’ve named a number of them throughout this chap-
ter, but you might also consider online reviews, tweets, recipes, game manuals, instructions, emails,
or memos. Find three to five examples of artifacts within the genre. Now try identifying some of the
components of the genre:
• What is the genre’s exigency?
• What is the social action of the genre? What does it do?
• What are the conventions of the genre? What are features it has evolved to include? What are
perhaps other features this genre has shed or left behind for good reason?
• What are the deviations in the various examples you have collected? Which are most effective
and why?
Taking these findings together, what can you learn about the genre? What is the impact of the genre?
How might you use this information in the future?
Working With Words 85

that encouraged members of the community to be vigilant about their safety

and active in reporting suspicions. Unfortunately, given the vague informa-
tion about suspects provided in the crime notices, the change in the genre
had the impact of making members of the campus community feel unsafe
and encouraging people to act on racial biases rather than evidence. Our
analysis helped us understand this campus problem and offer strategies for
confronting it.

Focus on Delivery: Developing

a Coding Scheme
Now we turn to making sense of methods for examining discursive patterns
by developing a coding scheme. There are a few ways to develop codes and to
identify the emergent patterns in the corpus:
• Deductive coding/tagging: With this approach, you use a theoreti-
cal frame, research instrument, or established set of codes and look
through your data to tag places where you see the pattern operating.
• Inductive coding/tagging: With this approach you develop codes
based on interpretation. Instead of bringing a prescriptive set of
patterns to a text and then looking for those patterns, you approach
your data with openness. Then, you read, rhetorically listen to, and
annotate your text. Next, as you notice connections between ideas
and words in the text, you develop codes that describe those patterns.
Finally, you apply these codes throughout the corpus by systematically
noting each time you see the code applied.
Whichever approach you use, make sure to be consistent with your codes.
To be systematic with your coding, develop a plan for identifying your codes
within the corpus. There are numerous digital platforms that can help you,
or you can create a coding notebook, and you might consider color-coding
to make your coded data discernible. You might triangulate your findings
by working with a partner or research team to see if they code the data in the
same way that you do.
 86 Chapter 4

Florian Schneider suggests that you might pay attention to the following kinds
of linguistic and rhetorical patterns in a text, and they may become your codes:
• Word groups: Be attentive to the vocabulary and syntax. Certain
groups of words may demonstrate connection to a particular commu-
nity, interest, or event.
• Grammar features: Consider pronoun usage, demonstrations of col-
loquial or vernacular language, and level of formality.
• Rhetorical and literary figures: Look for specific uses of language
such as allegories, metaphors, similes, idioms, and proverbs. If you’re
unfamiliar with these terms, take time to look them up and find some
examples.
• Direct and indirect speech: Identify the speaker(s) in the text. Do
some of the ideas or words come from someone other than the au-
thor? If so, when? What is the effect?
• Once you’ve coded your data, carefully write up your findings.
Then, it is time to make sense of what you have learned! Consider the
significance of the words you have examined, their rhetorical impact,
and the contextual meaning you have identified. Chapter 8 offers some
different recommendations for how you might write up your findings.

Works Cited
Antaki, Charles, et al. “Discourse Analysis Means Doing Analysis: A Critique of Six
Analytic Shortcomings.” Discourse Analysis Online, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003. Sheffield
Hallam University, extra.shu.ac.uk/daol/articles/v1/n1/a1/antaki2002002.html.
Aristotle. Rhetoric, translated by W. Rhys Roberts. Internet Classics Archive, classics.
mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html.
Bazerman, Charles. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experi-
mental Article in Science. 1988. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2000. wac.colostate.edu/
books/landmarks/bazerman-shaping/.
Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford UP, 1998.
Working With Words 87

Foss, Sonja K., and Cindy L. Griffin. “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invita-
tional Rhetoric.” Communication Monographs, vol. 62, no. 1, March 1995, pp. 2-18.
doi.org/10.1080/03637759509376345.
Gonzalez, Jennifer. Cult of Pedagogy, www.cultofpedagogy.com/.
Lenssen, Paige. “The Ethics and Legality of Financial Regulation: What Enron
Revealed.” Xchanges, vol. 10, no. 2, xchanges.org/the-ethics-and-legality-of-finan-
cial-regulation-10-2-11-1.
Mckoy, Temptaous. “#IssaTrapDissertation,” Socratemp.com. 2021.
Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech,
vol. 70, no. 2, May 1984, pp. 151-67. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.
org/10.1080/00335638409383686.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern
Illinois UP, 2006.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Oxford UP, 1965.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among Afri-
can American Women, U Pittsburgh P, 2000.
Schneider, Florian. “How to Do a Discourse Analysis.” Politics East Asia, 13 May 2013,
www.politicseastasia.com/studying/how-to-do-a-discourse-analysis/.
Smith, Dorothy E. “’K is Mentally Ill:’ The Anatomy of a Factual Account.”
Sociology, vol. 12, no. 1, 1 January 1978, pp. 23-53. Sage Journals, doi.
org/10.1177/003803857801200103.
Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. Writing About Writing. Bedford/St. Martins,
fourth edition, 2020.
Chapter 5. Working with People
New to town, you notice a lot of activity at a skate park near where you live.
You walk nearby a time or two, noticing the activities, which involve small
groups of teenagers, some of whom talk with one another and others of
whom appear far more interested in attempting skateboarding feats while
friends and accomplices video record.
At a local coffee shop where you frequently go to study, you begin to notice
a pattern in the ways twenty-somethings sit at tables by themselves and
divide their time between paying attention to their phones and paying
attention to their computer screens.
You’ve started a new job at a local restaurant where the managers, kitchen
team, and front of the house staff gather for weekly meetings. By the fourth
meeting, you notice the same people talk, some of them saying the same
things almost verbatim each week.
In each of these scenarios, you begin to wonder why and how people do what
they do in these contexts. Questions begin to form. In this chapter, you will
learn more about how researchers work with people and how they might ap-
proach such contexts.
Just as working with archives requires that we build careful stories of those
who lived in the past, choosing to do research by working with people in the
present requires a great degree of care. In Chapter 2, we suggested that ethi-
cal research with people begins with following your university’s practices for
working with human subjects. In this chapter, we discuss different research
methods that can be helpful once you’ve determined that your research ques-
tion is best answered through writing with, talking to, or observing people. As
we discussed in Chapter 3, there’s a lot of information already out there in sec-
ondary forms of research—literature that has already been read and reviewed,
surveys that have already been conducted, sources that have already included
ethnographic research in their design so that you don’t have to. Ethnography
(from the Greek ethno-, meaning “people” and -grapho, meaning “to write”) is
a common research methodology, a way of thinking and doing that includes
many kinds of methods put together as data in the humanities and social sci-

89
 90 Chapter 5

ences. It uses a variety of research practices that work with people in order to
come to some kind of conclusion about a societal or cultural phenomenon. In
order to study societies, of course, you have to work with people, which is why
ethnographers use a variety of methods in their research that we cover here,
like interviews and surveys, as well as some of the methods that we’ve talked
about in earlier chapters, like coding schemes.
While you may or may not be ready to become an ethnographer, it helps
to think about your research question a bit in order to determine if it might be
Because working with best answered by working with people rather than in some other way.* When
people also frequently we conduct research about writing in particular, our first impulse may be to
takes into account talk to those who are already engaged in the practice we are interested in:
their positions and those who write! However, it’s important to remember before we decide to
situations, there may
work with people that many researchers who study writing have already pro-
be connections worth
exploring between duced a lot of knowledge on that subject by working with human subjects,
people and places whether by using focus groups to figure out if what students learn in university
or people and things writing classes transfers to other classes (Bergman and Zepernick), interview-
(see Chapter 6). ing students to see if there is a link between reading and identity (Glenn and
Ginsberg), or surveying students to see how they really feel about buying a
plagiarized essay online (Ritter). Lots of excellent people-based research has
already been done about a variety of research topics. It’s important to do some
preliminary reading (this is where your worknets come in!) to figure out if
you should go through the careful process of working with people or if your
research question can be answered by another means. It’s also important to
know when the benefits of working with people outweigh any potential draw-
backs. Some questions you can ask yourself as you decide if you want to work
with people in research that might span a semester are:

Try This Together: People-Focused Research (20 minutes)

Working with a partner, generate a list of three to five research focuses where people seem important
to some activity, but you aren’t aware of any studies related to this group, or you think the people may
be difficult to gain access to. Why do you think this group hasn’t been studied before? What are some
of the reasons access may be challenging? What ideas do you have for ways to gain access to this per-
son or group?
Working with People 91

Should I work with people?* Likely YES if Should I work with people? Likely NO if
• I want to replicate a prior study with • the research question has already The decision about
people on a smaller scale to see if it is been answered by many other stud- whether or not to
still true; ies and does not need replication; work with people
• I want to build on prior studies by • I already know what I think people should be made with
working with people; will answer; care. If possible, ask
other researching
• I have insider insight into a particular • I don’t know anyone from the
writers why they
group; population of people who would be
decided to work with
• I want to help preserve someone’s knowledgeable about my research
people (or not).
story or memory; question;
• there is information about people’s • I won’t have the time to transcribe or
behaviors, feelings, sensations, knowl- code a lot of data;
edge, background, or values about my • I have definite opinions about how
topic that I don’t know and cannot people should behave or respond
find out any other way; while I work with them;
• my ethics review and research can be • my work will be with vulnerable
completed in the time I have allotted people—for example, under the age
for this work; of 18—or about sensitive content;
• I want to gather pilot information on • my work will put people in physical
a topic rather than generate definite or emotional discomfort; or
conclusions; or • I have some kind of power over the
• working with people might help prove people I might work with.
or disprove a theory.

Once you’ve decided that you want to work with people in order to gather
data to try to answer your research question, it’s important to think about the
kind of method you want to use. We’ll be talking about surveys, interviews,
and case-study approaches to research design in this chapter, and each meth-
od has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages (often related to how
much time a researcher has to work with large amounts of data). We like to
think of these as differences in the proximity—closeness—of a researcher
to her research question and how it might be best answered. A survey is an
eagle-eye, overhead view of a group of people that gathers big-picture and
multilayered information, often about a breadth of knowledge, behaviors, and
opinions. Interviews allow for a much closer, intimate, in-depth view of one
 92 Chapter 5

or more of those same things. A case-study approach might balance between

near and far, using some up-close interview data or site-based observations to
support parts of an argument, and using the benefit of the breadth of survey
data to support other parts. As you begin to think about which method is right
for you, start thinking about whether your question implies a research strategy
that would be better as a snapshot from above (How stressed out does writing
a paper make university students?) or as an in-depth look into particular pro-
cesses (How stressed out did writing a paper make a particular student over a
particular period time?).

Surveys
One of the ways we collect data about numbers of people that are too large
to interview—depending on your time frame for data collection, this might
be 20 people or it might be in the thousands—is a survey. A survey is a series
of carefully-designed questions, sometimes called a questionnaire. In the
context of a research project, surveys are put together with the intention of
The word “vari- gathering information that will answer a bigger research question. Whether
ables” is also used working with smaller or larger populations of people, surveys can help you
to describe quantita- determine both countable, or quantitative, information about your respon-
tive data. Much like dents (how many people answered yes or no on a question, for example)
qualitative variables, and descriptive information, or qualitative data, about their opinions, habits,
variables in those cas-
and beliefs—what we might call variables.* In the following examples, we
es are items that you
can measure, such as discuss how a researcher might go about research design and considerations
time, height, density, when working with small and large groups as well as with one or more vari-
distance, strength, ables. However, when it comes to survey question design and survey im-
and weight. Such plementation (getting your surveys out to intended respondents), there are
variables are usually resources that you can access that will help no matter how large or small a
those that come with population you study.
measurement mark-
Example 1: You get your most recent paper back from your instructor, and
ers—pounds, inches,
on it you’ve received a B+. All in all, you’re pretty happy, since you’ve always
centimeters, microns,
moles. gotten Bs on high school writing assignments. You get into a conversation
after class with someone next to you who is very upset that he got a B+ on
Working with People 93

his paper. “I’ve only ever gotten As on high school English papers,” he says.
Because of this conversation, you’ve become curious about how being graded
on writing in high school affects people’s perception of themselves as “good”
writers by the time they are in college or university. A well-designed survey
might look at a small relevant population of people (say, a classroom’s worth.
Your classroom’s worth!) that would help determine both the answer to that
research question and even the future pathway of a research project—perhaps
after surveying 25 students, you are so interested in some answers that you’d
like to follow up more closely by interviewing four or five of them. A research
project of this size benefits from convenience sampling*—finding survey par- What are some
ticipants by who you know. ethical implications of
convenience sam-
Once you know who you are going to survey, you might think about
pling?
the kinds of information that would be helpful to know about the two vari-
ables you’re interested in: people’s feelings about themselves as writers and
their feelings about grades. You might survey respondents with open-ended
questions, which allow students to write (or say) their responses in short
statements or sentences, or with closed-ended questions, in which stu-
dents would choose among a finite set of answer choices (like “yes” or “no”).
Open-ended questions better allow you to report descriptive data, while
closed-ended questions allow you to get a quick snapshot of a large number
of responses. Question design depends on the kind of information you need:
if you need to determine what you mean by a “good” writer, you’ll need
to be able to define it—or determine if that’s something you’ll want your
survey respondents to define for you. You may want to know about what
kinds of grades or comments students received on high school papers and
what kinds of grades or comments they’ve received on college or university
papers. These kinds of information are well-suited to open-ended questions.
However, you might also want to know how happy students are with par-
ticular grades. In order to get that information, it might be best to ask stu-
dents closed-ended questions, assessing people’s feelings about writing on an
ordinal scale—an ordered set of numbers that correspond to a variable, like
how happy or unhappy a student is with a particular grade on a paper. The
people you’re surveying should be able to distinguish between the kinds of
modifiers you use to describe that variable.
 94 Chapter 5

For example:
I just got a B back on my last paper. On a scale of 1-5, I am
1. Extremely happy
2. Very happy
3. Somewhat happy
4. Not so happy
5. Not at all happy

Most people can figure out that in the order of things, “extremely” is higher
than “very,” and “not at all” is lower than “not so.” The easy part about this kind
of survey is that you can distribute and collect the survey in class. After you
collect your survey data, you can begin to put together a picture of how the
small sample group you’re working with feels about the relationship between
high school and college or university paper grades and how the group mem-
bers feel about their writing performance. However, it would be important to
compare what you find out with other studies that have been done about your
topic in order to synthesize as much available data as you can in order to draw
conclusions from it.
Example 2: Let’s say you’ve been thinking a lot about a conversation you’ve
had with your father recently. In it, he talked a lot about unpredictable weather
and how it’s been affecting his gardens. When you brought up the idea of glob-
al warming, he got a bit flustered and insisted that it was just a matter of weath-
er variability. Since then, you’ve been thinking a lot about whether the kind of
words people use to discuss climate change impacts whether or not they be-
lieve in it as a proven scientific phenomenon. After doing a bit of reading, you
come across an article that talks about the kinds of questions climate-change
surveys ask their respondents—Tariq Abdel-Monem and colleagues’ “Climate
Change Survey Measures: Exploring Perceived Bias and Question Interpreta-
tion.” At the end of that article, you notice the authors mentioned that often
survey respondents did not have a clear consensus about the definitions of the
terms used to describe climate change. The authors call for more research on
that issue in particular, which fits well with the thoughts you’d been having
about the conversation with your father.
Working with People 95

You decide to design a survey to help clarify how people interpret cli-
mate-related terms, like “weather variability,” “climate change,” “global
warming,” “greenhouse effect,” and “arctic shrinkage.” Because you’re in-
terested in how lots of people define these terms, you’re not limiting your
sample only by the convenience of who you are immediately near but on a
more random sample of groups of people that begin with who you know but
snowball, or grow bigger, from there: you might make a list of all possible
people you could send a survey to, such as people in all of your classes, your
instructors, your friends, your parents and grandparents and their friends,
clubs you and your family belong to, members of a church, organization, or
extracurricular activity. This list might make you decide that you are only
interested in a certain demographic (or particular slice of the population,
such as those between the ages of 18-25), in which case you might narrow
your list to one or two groups and make sure that you have the people you
survey identify their age groups in a survey question. If you just want large
numbers of responses and are only mildly interested in demographic data,
you might design a survey that can be distributed online and circulated
widely—posted on social media, for example, or to online classroom mes-
sage boards. Perhaps you would aim, in this case, to survey 100 people about
their interpretation of climate-related terms.
In this example, you’ll want to think about the best way to answer a specif-
ic research question about how people interpret climate-related terminology.
Because there has been a lot of survey research already done in this area, your
best place to start designing your survey is to look at surveys that have been
conducted before—which brings us to some good advice about survey design,
no matter the research question!

Try This: Writing Survey Questions (30 minutes)

Write two survey questions each for Examples 1 and 2. What underlying concept or variable are your
survey questions trying to explore? How do those variables relate to the research question in each
example? How do your survey questions for Example 1 (writing and grades) and Example 2 (climate
change) differ according to what you’re trying to find out?
 96 Chapter 5

Designing Good Questionnaires

Unlike interviews, which are often intimately tied to a research design that is so
specific they usually have to be uniquely crafted, surveys are often more general.
Yet, like interview questions, survey questions should be tested before they are
launched in a questionnaire and you accidentally receive information you don’t
want! The good news is that you have access to a range of national and interna-
tional surveys (and their questions) that have already been pre-tested for you:
Roper iPoll through the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (ropercen-
ter.cornell.edu/ipoll/), the Pew Research Center (www.pewresearch.org/), Gal-
lup (www.gallup.com/home.aspx), the Inter-University Consortium for Political
and Social Research (ICPSR) (www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/ICPSR/index.
html), and Ipsos (www.ipsos.com/en) all store large repositories of surveys—
both their analyses and the questions themselves. You can search them by key-
word and find surveys on topics done that are similar to the one you’re planning.
Once you have a few models of survey questions, you can change them to
suit your needs. There are a few best practices to keep in mind when designing
your own questionnaire:
• Don’t forget instructions! Be sure to tell people briefly what they can
expect (how many questions, how to fill out the survey, and how long
it will take to complete).
• Questions should be clear and free of jargon: don’t put in any specialized
vocabulary that would be difficult for a respondent to understand.
• If you have to use technical terms, define them for your respondents.
• Each question should measure only one thing at a time—avoid ques-
tions that ask people to respond to multiple items in one question.
• If you are putting answers on a scale, respondents should have be-
tween five and seven points from which to choose.
• Be as specific as you can with your questions, whether they are open-
or closed-ended.
• Questions should be short. In fact, your questionnaire should be
short! When questions and surveys are too long, people lose interest
and do not complete them.
Working with People 97

• With closed-ended questions, people often choose the first option they
read (if reading a survey) and the last option they hear (if a survey is
read aloud). Vary the order of your answers to avoid this, if you can.
• Try to avoid loaded (or unloaded!) language that might persuade
your respondents to answer a certain way: there is a perceived differ-
ence between, for example, the words “climate change” and “global
warming.” Be sure you use the terminology you mean, and be ready to
explain your choices in your analysis.

Designing and Distributing Surveys

Surveys can be physically designed and distributed in a number of ways: on
paper through the mail, in person, on the phone, or online through email or a
distributed link. It’s important to note that if you deliver a survey in person (on
the phone or distributing a paper survey), you should have an introductory
script that gives a framework and instructions for your research.
If you are designing and/or distributing a survey online, you can use web- Test your survey by
sites that offer free survey software with some basic functionality—surveys sharing a draft with
of ten questions or less, say, or surveys that max out at a total number of a friend, roommate,
respondents.* These are excellent and professional sites to use to begin your or classmate and
listening to their
survey research, and the surveys you produce with them can be circulated
feedback. Sometimes
and embedded into emails to specific people or circulated as a link that can
called usability testing,
be forwarded on to other people than its first recipients. If you require more or user-testing, this,
functionality, you might check with your college or university’s research office, too, is an approach to
some of which give access to institutional survey software to students upon research commonly
request. This will enable you to design farther-reaching surveys that often have practiced by profes-
extra bells and whistles to their design and functionality, like graphic sliding sional and technical
scales, heat maps, and the ability to drag-and-drop text into categories. writers.

Try This: Revising Survey Questions (15 minutes)

Working with the questions for Examples 1 and 2 that you generated in the previous “Try This,” revise
your questions by following the suggestions in at least one of the best practices for writing questionnaires.
 98 Chapter 5

Once your survey is ready for distribution, it’s important to know that a
good research process should result in a high survey response rate. The larg-
er your sample size or the less you know your targeted audience (such as in
the climate change example), the lower your response rate is likely to be. In a
large survey, a good response rate is about 30 percent. So, if you really wanted
to survey 100 people, you would want to send your survey out to at least 300
people to try to reach that number. However, a high response rate for a small
survey, such as our first example of a 25-student classroom, is about 80 per-
cent—the smaller, more personal, and more targeted an audience, the higher
the response rate.
Now, let’s say you successfully surveyed 25 people in your classroom, but
after looking at your survey results, you decide you want more information
from just a few of those people. An interview might be an excellent method to
achieve that purpose.

Interviews
Interviews allow a researcher a real-time environment that allows for things
that surveys don’t, like being able to ask follow-up questions or asking some-
one to clarify an answer. Yet interviews also generate a lot of data because
conversations need to be recorded and usually transcribed or written down
(and it takes about three hours to transcribe every one hour of talk). A bene-
fit to interviews is that there are different types, depending on your research
question. You might sit down with a small group of people, called a focus
group, and ask one question to see how people respond and negotiate their
answers in groups, since usually one person’s response provokes agreement,
disagreement, or room for follow-up. A focus group might enable you to
get a general sense of consensus or understand divergent attitudes about
a particular variable. You might develop questions for 1-on-1 research
interviews, in which you sit down with one person at a time and ask them
a series of carefully-designed questions that help you answer your research
question (you might repeat the same set of questions with each interview for
consistency, in this case). If your purposes extend beyond only answering a
Working with People 99

research question and you are trying to preserve a sound recording of sto-
ries or memories for future generations to listen to, then you would conduct
an oral history interview with either one person or a group of people, in
which you would design an interview script with topics about a particular
area of interest and a long list of questions that you may or may not ask,
depending on your participant’s memory and willingness to talk. Unlike a
research interview, an oral history interview does not seek to replicate the
same questions for each interviewee but instead trusts the process of pro-
ceeding through topics and questions that result in the best outcome: an oral
history of a person, place, or group.

Asking Questions “From the Side”

Some of the same advice about survey questions applies to interview ques-
tions: They should be clear, specific, short, and free of specialized vocabulary
your interviewees might not know. They shouldn’t try to double up a few
questions in just one breath or be written in a way that offends a listener or
presumes something about them. However, unlike survey questions, inter-
views don’t really benefit from closed-ended (yes or no) questions; usually
you are more interested in why a participant answered yes or no.
Good interviews come from really good questions that are related to
your research question, but research questions often are not what you would
actually ask someone in an interview. In other words, there is a difference
between your research question and an interview question. The best way to
ask about your research question is actually by asking an interview question
from the side rather than head on. For example, a research question about
a topic you want to learn about—let’s say, plagiarism—is not best answered
by the most direct question. Asking, “Have you ever copied a paper from
someone?” likely would result in some discomfort on both sides of the inter-
viewing table. Instead, designing questions from the side might be a better
way to get at what you’re hoping to find out. In the case of curiosity about
plagiarism, you might ask about someone’s knowledge of online paper mills,
ask about whether or not they have ever had trouble with their works cit-
ed page, ask about their opinion of plagiarism detection software, or ask if
 100 Chapter 5

they know about campus resources that help students revise their work. All
of these topics are about plagiarism without developing an accusatory tone
about serious academic misconduct, and they would probably help you es-
tablish a more interesting angle for your own research question once you’ve
spoken to a few people.

Try This: Designing Interview Questions from the Side (30 minutes)
In order to design an interview question from the side, you’ll need to know your research question.
(Note that Chapter 1 introduces research questions and the ways they expand and shift throughout a
research process.) Once you have that, you’ll need to figure out what exactly it is you’re hoping to learn
to be able to answer that research question. Then, you’ll need to determine who you might ask to get
at what you want to learn. Finally, you’ll generate a list of interview questions that would help you get
at what you’re trying to learn—from the side! Here’s an example of how this process works:
• Research Question: What matters more in the workplace: “hard skills” (technical skills) or
“soft skills” (communication skills)?
• What I’m hoping to learn: Do employers value technical skills more than communication
skills or vice-versa? Are college or university graduates being given the tools they need in
technical and communication skills to get a job when they graduate? Which kind of skill is
the more difficult to learn?
• Who might have this information: Employers/employees at any company, recently employed
college or university graduates, instructors in both technical and communication-based fields
are all likely to have insights.
• Interview questions from the side that will help me learn what I want to know:
◉ For an employer: What is the most important skill an employee can have?
◉ For a student: What is the hardest assignment you ever had to complete? What made it so
hard?
◉ For anyone: Think about a recent problem that came up in your workplace. What do you
think caused it?
Based on this example, come up with some interview questions from the side for your own research
question.
Working with People 101

Interviewing Equipment and Best Practices

Unlike surveys, to really be useful, interviews need to be audio- or video-re-
corded and then transcribed so you can understand what was said in order to
interpret your data. This means that interviews require putting in some effort
to be successful: finding a comfortable and quiet place to meet (so that voices
are easily heard over any ambient noise), using a good quality audio and/or
video recorder, and finding the time it takes to listen and transcribe the voices
you hear (including your own). As you decide which kind of interview to con-
duct, you’ll want to consider that transcribing a 1-on-1 research or oral history
interview is much easier than transcribing a group interview, where people
talk over and interrupt one another. Similarly, in a video recording, it is easier
to set up a camera that captures two people in a frame than a whole group,
which may require another person to operate a camera. While we don’t expect
you to bring a camera crew to a group interview, it’s important to know the
benefits and constraints of working with certain kinds of equipment.
When it comes time to conduct the actual interview, you’ll want to talk to
your interviewees before you begin recording. About a week or so before, it

Try This Together: Interview Question Sketch (30 minutes)

In a small group, choose one of the following topics:
• Fake news
• Seasonal affective disorder
• Photo retouching
• Learning a second language
• Genetically modified foods
Next, complete the following steps:
1. Develop a research question about your chosen topic.
2. Decide what you would hope to learn from interviews.
3. Consider who might have the information you need.
4. Write three interview questions you might ask.
 102 Chapter 5

is often good practice to share the interview questions or interview script (in
A Deed of Gift is a the case of an oral history, which might be more loosely configured) with your
separate and special participant(s) so they know what you plan on asking and thus can be prepared
document from other with thoughtful answers. This isn’t always possible, especially if you don’t have
consent forms. In a a way of contacting your interviewees beforehand. The day of your interview,
Deed of Gift, the oral you should make sure that your participants know the details of where you’ll
history participant be meeting and at what time. Right before your interview, you should dis-
“gifts” the interview- cuss with your interviewee the ethics protocol of the interview in order to get
er (or institution, or
their informed consent, as we discussed in Chapter 2. If you’re undertaking
library, or archive)
their story so that an oral history interview, you will also want to discuss a deed of gift* with
other people may lis- your interviewee, in which they agree to release their story both to you and to
ten to it or use it for a larger public repository of other stories like theirs. This is unlike a research
research purposes. interview, in which it is likely that only you will ever listen to the recording

Try This Together: Research Interview vs. Oral History Interview (45 minutes)
Because a research interview is very different in its purpose (to help answer a research question) than
an oral history interview (which records and preserves stories and memories and sometimes helps to
answer a research question), it’s important that interview questions are designed with the appropri-
ate purpose in mind depending on the type of interview you’re conducting. Because they emphasize
storytelling, ways of seeing the self or the community, and memories of historical events, oral history
interviews often need fewer specific questions and more prompts than research interviews.
First, choose one of the following topics:
• Changes in telephone technology since its patent in 1876
• The best cake you’ve ever eaten
• The “millenium” or “Y2K” bug
• The development of a local community center in your region
• The increase in diabetes since 1980
• The price of gasoline over the last 100 years
Then, generate with a partner four different interview questions (one of which needs to be a follow-up
question) for both a research interview and an oral history interview. When you’re finished, discuss
the differences between the two sets of questions and what accounts for these differences.
Working with People 103

or read a transcript. After any kind of interview, you’ll want to follow up with
your interviewees with a brief note of thanks that reminds them of what will
happen with their data as well as how they might reach you if they have ques-
tions about the interview process.
When you’re interviewing, it’s important to keep track of your main re-
search question, as responses may stray from what you expect and you might
get caught up in what your interviewee is saying. It’s important to be prepared
with follow-up interview questions that might piggy-back off of a prior ques-
tion. Similarly, you might also want to be prepared to ask “Why?” or “Tell me
more about that,” after an answer you receive (especially if you get an answer
that is shorter than you expect). Sometimes the best questions simply ask for
clarification (“Could you tell me what you mean by that?” or “Could you give
me an example of what you mean?”) or are constructed on the fly (“Can we
go back to that example you talked about earlier?” or “How did you feel about
that?”). Oral history interviews benefit from mocking up an outline of topics
and then generating a list of many possible questions in each section of your
outline and letting the interview organically emerge from whatever series of
questions are appropriate.
Finally, it is important to take into account that, as the interviewer, you
develop and ask the questions. This places you in a position of power (even if
you don’t feel particularly powerful, such as if you are a student interviewing
an instructor). When you interview someone, you enter into a relationship
with them for a brief time, and it is important that everyone feels as comfort-
able as possible.

Putting It All Together: Case Studies

A case study is a kind of qualitative research method that combines data col-
lected from a variety of other methods that we have already talked about—like
surveys, interviews, and different kinds of documents and artifacts. A case-
study approach to answering a research question is best suited when the phe-
nomenon you’re studying is particular, or distinct, in relation to a larger soci-
ety, culture, or environment. You might want to look at a case to understand
 104 Chapter 5

broader details than any one method, like an interview with one person, might
tell you. Looking at cases is particularly helpful when researchers are trying to
gain some insight about the nature of a particular environment in more detail;
however, it’s important to note that the limitation of a case study is that one
single, detailed instance of a phenomenon cannot be used to generalize to all
instances of that kind of activity everywhere. Case studies offer us a snapshot
of an individual unit, a glimpse as comprehensive as we can get, that helps us
understand or know systems of the world—and its people—a bit better.
To undertake a case study, you will need to gather one or more kinds of
data that we have already discussed and then analyze or code it to find catego-
ries or patterns. Once you have those preliminary analyses or codes, you might
compare what you’ve found with other, similar cases. Finally, you’ll work to
interpret your research notes to come to some conclusions about how the case
you’ve chosen offers up an understanding of your research question.
For example, let’s say commencement is right around the corner and you
are interested in the rules and regulations that govern graduation—what peo-
ple can (and cannot) wear, what freedom they have to decorate their mortar-
board hats or wear culturally significant accessories, how honorary degrees get
conferred and taken away—and what graduation signifies in terms of a major
life event for college or university students. In other words, you are seeking an
answer to a broad research question, “What does commencement mean to a
college or university community?” Because most colleges and universities en-
gage in this activity, choosing to look at one—at the college or university you

Try This: Case Study Planning (30 minutes)

Using the commencement example above, develop design considerations for a case study by answer-
ing the following questions:
• What kinds of data will you collect?
• What are the best methods to use to collect your data?
• Who should you talk to?
• What other cases can you compare this case to?
• What are you going to look for in your data? What are your variables?
Working with People 105

attend—would offer a case-study glimpse at the nature of commencement.

Your examination of commencement at your institution would give an au-
dience some ways to understand how graduation is significant to college and
university communities.
You might begin this case study with a worknet, reviewing the literature
about the history of commencements, recent newsworthy pieces about dress
codes or cultural items that have made it into the popular press, and local
updates from your college or university about the who, what, where, and how
of commencement planning. Once you’ve done some reading, it’s time to plan
your case study: just what kind of data should you collect, from who, and why?
We realize that even planning out a case study as a brief exercise might
seem overwhelming, especially if you have to use one or more research meth-
ods to get there. That’s why it’s important at every step in your research pro-
cess—whether gathering a preliminary round of survey results, reflecting after
an interview or site-based observation, or handling a new artifact—to docu-
ment what you notice, document what sticks out during the experience you’ve
just had, document how it connects to other data-collection or data-handling
experiences, and document what significant patterns emerge as your research
experiences add up. Researchers call this documentation a research memo,* Research memos are
also remarkably im-
and it will help you move from data collection to data interpretation—in other
portant for showing
words, a research memo will help you begin to make sense of all the informa- the work and com-
tion you are gathering in a way that is not as overwhelming as looking at data municating in-prog-
from 50 surveys, 5 interviews, and 3 site visits all at once. ress analysis when
multiple researchers
collaborate.
Focus on Delivery: Writing
a Research Memo
A research memo is an in-between phase of writing: it’s not the same as the
data you collect or code, but it also isn’t a final research paper. Instead, it’s an
analytic memo that a researcher writes after each of their major data-collec-
tion episodes to help them make sense of what they just experienced. It helps
a researcher look back on the small pieces of what they’ve done to understand
 106 Chapter 5

emergent patterns for analysis of their research question. Because all of the
small parts of a case-study—field notes, transcriptions, documents, coding
sheets—can add up, taking time out to review and reflect is necessary.
Unlike the observant, real-time detail that is required of field notes, re-
search memos are instead a place for analysis, which means they are a place for
freewriting, thinking on paper, noting patterns and anomalies by comparing
one kind of data with another, assessing your progress or noting problems
with your research, planning for a future stage, and noting your feelings about
your research. You might think of a research memo as a working paper about
the major data points of your case study—this may mean one interview or a
series of interviews, one site visit or multiple visits, one coding sheet or ten
coding sheets. Regardless, it’s important to keep up with your research memos,
as they will simplify the process of interpreting multiple kinds of data.
As you write your research memo, it is best if you have with you the data
you’ve already collected (the interview transcript, field notes, coding sheet,
document, or artifact).
In your research memo, you should
• include relevant dates and data types (e.g., “June 14 research memo on
interview with Sonja Notte, May 31”) and bibliographic information if
a textual source;
• include relevant quotations (for interviews or surveys), quantities (for
surveys), observations (for fieldwork), words and phrases (for coded
documents), or descriptions (for material artifacts) that stick out to
you from your data collection;
• record why you think these chosen details are important, relevant, or
stick out;
• reflect on how the data contributes to clarifying your research ques-
tion or helps to define or refine the scope of your research question
(this can help you revise your research proposal); and
• comment on what you think of the data: What questions do you have?
What patterns or trends are emerging when you consider this data
in light of others you’ve collected? What connections can you make
across data sets? What confuses you?
Working with People 107

Works Cited
Abdel-Monem, Tariq, et al. “Climate Change Survey Measures: Exploring Perceived
Bias and Question Interpretation.” Great Plains Research, vol. 24, no. 2, 2014, pp.
153-68. Project Muse, doi.org/10.1353/gpr.2014.0035.
Bergman, Linda S., and Janet S. Zepernick. “Disciplinarity and Transfer: Students’
Perceptions of Learning to Write.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol.
31, no. 1-2, 2007, pp. 124-49, associationdatabase.co/archives/31n1-2/31n1-2berg-
mann-zepernick.pdf.
Glenn, Wendy J., and Ricki Ginsberg. “Resisting Readers’ Identity (Re)Construction
across English and Young Adult Literature Course Contexts.” Research in the
Teaching of English, vol. 51, no. 1, 2016, pp. 84-105. National Council of Teachers of
English, library.ncte.org/journals/rte/issues/v51-1/28686.
Ritter, Kelly. “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers,
and First-Year Composition.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 56,
no. 4, 2005, pp. 601-31.
Chapter 6. Working with
Places and Things
So far in this book, we’ve been paying close attention to words and how to
do things that are ethical, meaningful, and methodical with them. In Chapter 2,
we learned about how using citation systems and institutional reviews are ways
of ethically planning for and representing the people and ideas we are working
with. In Chapter 3, we talked about affinity and choric worknets, how words on a
page can form relationships between people over time, and how words can con-
struct inventive worlds we hadn’t thought about before. In Chapter 4, we intro-
duced coding and analysis and worked on developing a methodical research de-
sign that helps us understand the patterns that develop in language. In Chapter
5, we considered how and when to include people in our research. In this chap-
ter, we focus on the where* of working with words and people: where you might Whether working in
find words that matter, where you might go to understand that words happen archives, observing
in particular places and are used by particular people with particular materials, specific sites, or map-
ping individual spaces,
and the wheres you can create in your own primary research that are worth
considering the places
exploring. This chapter will give you some options for deciding if archives, site-
where language hap-
based observing, or mapmaking are good choices for you to use to answer the pens and the things
research question(s) you began working with in Chapter 1. Considering these we use to understand
methods might also give rise to new questions you want to work with. those activities is a
You might be wondering why place matters in writing, or why we should central part of being a
care about things if we are primarily working with words. The short answer is researcher.
because where people are, and the things they are surrounded by, matter to the
kinds of writing they produce and the subjects they care about. Places and things
help build a particular rhetorical situation, and those situations create knowl-
edge problems that we, as researchers, might solve. The longer answer might be
imagined with a few examples of interesting knowledge problems that emerge
when we consider how words are complicated by places and things:
• How safe is the place you live? How does the ability to walk in your
neighborhood at certain times of day reinforce or detract from feeling
safe? [working with places]
109
 110 Chapter 6

• What happens when we look for a source using the library’s online
catalogue compared to walking around and navigating the stacks?
[working with places]
• What is the experience of reading an ebook or PDF compared to a
printed book? What sights, sounds, feelings, and smells do you associ-
ate with each one? [working with things]
• How does it feel to read a recipe and then join a family member or
friend in making your favorite dish the way you’ve always eaten it?
[working with things]
• What might be the experience of reading love letters between two
people who lived a hundred years ago compared to reading a roman-
tic textual exchange on someone’s phone today? [working with places
and things]
• What changes when you use a nature identification app to learn
about local plants or animals and then try to identify the nature
around you on a walk to campus or in your neighborhood? [working
with places and things]
• How does reading a job preparation manual differ from being on a job
site? How are experiences, equipment use, and safety changed by going
to a job versus reading about work? [working with places and things]
Each of these situations ask us to consider words in conjunction with plac-
es and things—how words are shaped by our experiences with places; how our
bodies feel at a desk or perusing shelves; or how a walk in the woods, a meal in
a kitchen, or a visit to a job site might impact our feelings about the words we
use or the words we read.

Try This: Identifying Campus Trees (60 minutes)

Take a walk around or nearby your campus, noting how many and what kinds of trees you find. Write
down important tree details: how tall they are, how their leaves are shaped (or whether they have
leaves during the season you observe them), where they are planted, and what they smell like. Write
down the names of the trees you know, and use a nature identification app to help you find out the
names you don’t.
Working with Places and Things 111

In this chapter, we pay special attention to the way places invoke our sens-
While we can’t
es—sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—and the way involvement of our senses exactly put rhetoric
shapes our research. We also look at the role things play in our research ques- on a scale to know
tions and research designs as well as the kind of rhetorical weight* they lend what it weighs, we
to our data as we fully examine our research question. can think of rhetorical
weight as a metaphor
for significance, or
the ways that our
Methods Can Be Material focus on important
concepts may be
If we remember the definition of research methods from Chapter 1, that changed by the way
is, that they are the tools, instruments, practices, and processes that help us data is considered or
answer our research questions, it’s important to recognize that some meth- presented.
ods that help us think through and answer those questions are actual things
themselves, whether we make them ourselves or use instruments to help us
collect our data. Researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds use
the process of making using things as a vital part of their research methods.
Take, for example, the way that making a textile, like a basket or a quilt, helps
give our bodies a particular kind of touch knowledge. When we engage in
sharing that basket or quilt with others and observe their reactions to our ef-
forts, that gives us a certain kind of affective, embodied, or feeling-knowledge.
It is possible that the only way to really answer a research question about how
baskets or quilts make us feel or what significance they have for a community
is by engaging in the material making. Thus, even seemingly ordinary practic-
es like basket making or quilting can be a research method if they help provide
knowledge about a research question.
Similarly, working with instruments as things helps us extend our knowl-
edge to answer research questions in different ways. Perhaps, after trying to
identify trees on your campus using all of your senses, you are interested in
trees and the different ways they make us feel about the environments we
live in. As a continuation of the “Try This” that invites you to explore campus
grounds with particular attention to trees, you might move forward in such
an investigation with a campus tree survey, even using satellite maps to locate
where all of the trees are on your campus and visiting and taking pictures at
each of those places to count how many trees exist where you spend so much
 112 Chapter 6

time each day (see Chapter 7). Following your making of a campus tree survey,
even if limited to a small section of campus, you might then, as part of your
research design (see Chapter 5), create a questionnaire about how people feel
about nature on campus. You also might look at the way researchers have used
a variety of instruments and tools to measure this same phenomenon, for ex-
ample through the use of small microphones and surface transducers (speak-
ers) embedded in the bark of trees to give rise to projects like the ListenTree
project (listentree.media.mit.edu/), in which people can listen to the sonic vi-
brations trees make in forests, or the Danish Living Tree project (airlab.itu.dk/
the-living-tree), in which researchers placed small, hidden speakers in trees
to allow people around them to listen differently to the life of trees represent-
ed sonically: the sounds of insects crawling, or the tree “breathing” as people
get closer to it. In those particular cases, things—both instruments (micro-
phones and speaker) and non-humans (trees)—help us understand different
facets of the research question in ways that reading a literature review about
the coniferous and deciduous trees in our area might not. It’s important to
recognize that research methods engage places, things, and texts in sometimes
complicated ways and that sometimes texts themselves may be things: images,
recordings, and ephemera—those things we never imagine might be collected
and given meaning, like ticket stubs, receipts, flyers, buttons, and letters.

Archival Methods
Whether located One of the ways that writers conduct primary research is by going to original
online, in campus sources*—sources unlike the secondary sources discussed in Chapter 3, such
buildings, or in your as books and articles, that we usually find at the library or through a database
own house, archives search. Original sources are singular (one-of-a-kind) and provide first-hand ac-
are important places counts of events. They are also known as primary sources. One of the main plac-
where writing hap- es a researcher can find original sources are in archives—collections of materials
pens and where we
such as images, texts, or audio and video recordings that are housed in one place
can uncover voices
and artifacts from the
and usually catalogued and ordered in a way that helps researchers locate the
past. sources they want to work with. Thus, archival research methods are shaped by
considering history and how it can be built out of a collection of things.
Working with Places and Things 113

There are a few different kinds of archives, and some of them are accessed
easily and from the comfort of your own home. Internet or digital archives are
growing daily: a quick search will tell you that archival materials are available
in their entirety about subjects as varied as literacy narratives (www.thedaln.
org/), nature images (desertmuseum.org/center/digital_library.php), or AIDS
activism (www.actuporalhistory.org/), to name a few. There are a number of
websites devoted to putting many portals of digital archives in one place, no-
tably the Digital Public Library of America (dp.la/).
What distinguishes a digital archive from a physical one is often access:
some archives only digitize some content rather than all content, and some
digital archives have no real physical home. Physical archives, or traditional
archives, are usually housed in brick-and-mortar places: public libraries,
universities and colleges, corporations, governments, museums, or histori-
cal societies. When they’re grouped together, the sources located in archives
are called fonds (pronounced fon), which tells you they are grouped in a
specific way by the people—archivists—who put them together. Navigating
the fonds is some of the most difficult (and rewarding!) work of archival
research, and it often takes more time than other kinds of research. Much as
working with a new computer program isn’t intuitive unless you’ve made the
program yourself, often you either have to think like someone else to nav-
igate the fonds or let a bit of serendipity lead the way. The most important
things to know about conducting archival research are the following: every
archive is different and comes with different rules (which are useful to know
ahead of time), most archives utilize some kind of finding aid—a descrip-
tion that places the material in context—to help researchers use them, and
most archives are staffed with archivists—people who can help you navi-
gate the archives so that you can find what you think you’re looking for. We
say “think you’re looking for” because in many cases, archival work is more
about what you don’t find when you’re expecting to, or what you do find
when you aren’t!
Archival research isn’t an exact science: often materials are labeled differ-
ently than you would label them or filed in one of any number of ways (for ex-
ample, a letter about the Old Faithful geyser between two rangers in a historic
Yellowstone Park archive might be filed under the rangers’ names, under “Old
 114 Chapter 6

Try This: Working with a Digital Archive (45 minutes)

Locate a digital archive that originates from a place close to where you are—in the same city, state, or
region. Find one artifact in the archive (image, text, audio, video) and answer the following questions
about it:
• What kind of artifact is it? Who authored it and for what purpose?
• What does the kind of artifact it is tell you about what it contains? How does the artifact type
(for example, interview transcript, photograph, or meeting note) give you clues as to what it
can contain and what it cannot?
• Why was the artifact created and by whom was it made? What function did/does it serve?
• Who was the intended audience for the artifact? Do you think the creator ever intended you
to be viewing the artifact?
• When was the artifact created? What was going on in the world then that could have affected
its creation?
• Where was the artifact created? Did it have to travel to be included in the archive? What does
that tell you about the artifact?
• What clues from the artifact (words, formality or informality of tone or dress, position of
landmarks or commonplaces) help you understand where it comes from?
• Is the artifact unique, or is it one of a series of other artifacts like it? How do you know?
• How reliable is the artifact? How do you know? How would you cite this artifact?
• Who is missing from the artifact, and what might that tell you about the time or place it was
made?
• What is your own reaction to the artifact? How does it make you feel? Which of your senses
are engaged by the artifact?
• What questions do you have about the artifact?
Once you have generated the answers to these questions, do one of the following:
• Draft a research proposal (see Chapter 1) that creates a research question about this artifact
and uses archival research as a method; OR
• Write a rhetorical analysis (see Chapter 4) of this artifact.
Working with Places and Things 115

Faithful,” or under miscellaneous letters). The key to archival research is being

patient, being flexible, and knowing that it may take one or more return trips.
Some tips for visiting traditional archives are:
• Research the archives in advance. Sometimes you have to request
materials a few days in advance of your arrival or have a special pass
to visit them. You can also usually locate the particular finding aids
that an archive uses to help you find or request what you’re looking for
ahead of time.
• Plan what to bring. Many archives do not allow you to bring comput-
ers or cell phones and allow a pencil and paper only for notetaking.
How might this affect your research process?
• Know the costs. If you either cannot or are not allowed to take photos
of the archival materials, many archives offer printing services, but
these often come at a price.
A final type of archive is a personal archive—a collection of materials that
might be housed with you, a friend, or a relative. Perhaps your grandmother
kept a collection of quilting fabric, quilts that she made, and quilting books
that is in a box or closet that you know of. Or maybe your aunt has amassed
a large assortment of baseball memorabilia including newspaper clippings of
her favorite teams, thousands of cards, jerseys, and signed baseballs. It is also
conceivable that you have been keeping a written record of your goings-on for
the last fifteen years, from report cards to journals to artwork to emails. While
cataloguing these personal archives would take far more work than simply go-
ing to an archive and using a finding aid, they are rich sources of research that

Try This: Identifying a Personal Collection (1 hour)

Bring to class a personal collection of things. You may not think of old notebooks, pictures, or digital
spaces as archives, but they hold information about your past, about who you were at a different time
in your life. Turn your analytical eye to the archive and use primary research methods to make sense
of who you were and what artifacts you developed or collected at that time. Using labels, ordering,
and framing documents, curate and order artifacts from your collection, giving each piece meaning
as part of a whole archive.
 116 Chapter 6

allow you to engage more deeply with the contexts and places that artifacts
have emerged from in ways that reading about them in a textbook would not.
To that end, what separates an archive from a pile of stuff is the meaning that
we give it by curation—the way we select, order, and label items in a way that
gives shape to the significance of the collection.
One part of working with archives is caring for the people you come in
contact with, even if you have never met those people who were involved with
the artifacts you’ve found—or even if they are long gone. How might you rep-
resent in an ethical way an image, a set of correspondence, or a relationship
that appears in the archives? It’s important to think of uncovering the primary
research of the archives that others may or may not have looked at closely as a
way of honoring stories that have been there before we get to them. Whether
this means we tell partial stories (perhaps we leave the part about our aunt’s
baseball boyfriend out of our archival story), spend time carefully construct-
ing the contexts for artifacts (as in the case of marginalized groups, such as
prison inmate records in the New York State Archive, or those records in Ire-
land’s National Archive of women forced to give babies up for adoption by
the Catholic church in the late 1960s), or reflect on our own connection with
those we learn from in the archives, it is important to remember that what we
find in the archives brings a past place into a present one—and that you are the
person responsible for handling those places with care.

Site-Based Observations
Although archival work with artifacts, materials, and things asks that we pay
special attention to understanding and piecing together a historical past, site-
based observations, often called fieldwork or field methods, emphasize how
close reading of sites helps us more deeply engage with a particular present.
Site-based observations are an important part of qualitative research because
they depend on a researcher’s experience to explain a phenomenon and re-
sult in thick description—detailed notes—that help emplace a reader in the
research while providing evidence about a particular activity or situation that
the researcher has experienced.
Working with Places and Things 117

Central to site-based observations is selecting a site that will give you more
information about your research question than only reading the literature
about it will tell you. For example, if you are curious about how often tex-
ting gets in the way of a person’s everyday life, you could read studies about
technology and distraction to gather some preliminary ideas about it. But if
you wanted to generate your own primary research that could help answer
that question, you might select a busy campus spot for a certain amount of
time—say, two hours—and observe how often texting impacts people’s ability
to walk, multitask, cross a street, or interact with others. By writing down what
you see in detailed field notes, you will also have observational data that will
help you answer your research question.
However, site-based observation isn’t just sitting down and recording what
you see. Selection of a site, subjects (or people), activities, and things that you
record should have some definable reason behind why those and not others,
and it’s important to spend some time thinking about your choices of site be-
fore you begin fieldwork. From the example above, where is the best spot for
learning about texting and walking? Who is most likely to be engaging in the
behavior you wish to observe? Why is the activity and site you’ve chosen the
best representative of what you’re trying to explore—for example, why use
site-based observation when you might instead survey people about texting
and distraction? What assumptions do you already have about texting and
distraction that could impact how you represent it in your field notes?

Try This Together: Classroom Site-Based Observation

and Comparing Field Notes (45 minutes)
During a regularly scheduled class time, devote the first 20 minutes with your classmates to treating
your classroom like a field site. While your instructor teaches class, keep a field notebook of what hap-
pens, recording both informational and personal responses to the class. At the end of the 20 minutes,
compare your notes with a peer’s notes. Which events, details, and sensations were similar? Which
were different? How could these similarities and differences be tied to the way you chose to take field
notes? What did your note taking strategies allow you to notice, and what did they force you to miss?
Discuss as a class what some of the best note taking strategies were for maintaining accuracy, detailing
what happened, and recording personal reactions.
 118 Chapter 6

Once you’ve generated some ideas about your chosen site and research
question and gathered the permission you need (if you’re working with human
Field notes can also
subjects; see Chapter 5), it’s time to keep field notes*—detailed observations
include sketches and
about your chosen site that will help others have a rich view of a particular
hand-drawn maps,
which are meant place. Field notes depend on your ability to be a close observer of what you see:
to capture fields of detail people, places, and things; document sounds, smells, textures, feelings,
vision, orientations to weather conditions, tastes, colors; and define as closely as you can elements
space, and measurable that others might not understand or share (for example, instead of “she wrote
distances. slowly” you might write “it took the writer ten minutes to compose her first
sentence”). There are a few different ways to keep field notes, but we encourage
you to keep a special notebook that is lightweight and portable and that you
use only for site-based observations.
Many site-based observations take the form of a double-entry journal (see
Figure 6.1) that in some way splits your notes into two columns, one side that
documents an informational record of what is happening, and the other side
that contains a more personal response to what is happening. These might be
split and labeled “information” and “personal” or “record” and “response,” and
they are a good way to begin to think about the difference between what is
happening and what you feel about what is happening around you.
But once you delve into a site, especially if you return to the same site more
than once, you’ll need to develop your own system for detailing, documenting,
and defining what you see. Often there is so much happening in a place that it
is difficult to know where to begin notetaking: Which conversation soundbyte
is important? Does the weather or the time of day matter? What happens if
you’re feeling sick that day on the site? Because every site is filled with rich
detail, and every researcher might take different field notes about the same
moment, it’s important for you to develop a system for your note taking that
will help you later connect your observations to your research question. We
suggest that whatever form your field notes take, you aim for the following:
• Accuracy: record the same kinds of information during every obser-
vational visit (date, time, location).
• Detail: record the who, what, where of every visit (conversation bits,
room or site conditions and description, length of time it takes for
something to happen).
Working with Places and Things 119

It’s important to keep

in mind that site-
based observation
is a source of data,
and that, in order to
Figure 6.1. Example of a double-entry journal for field notes. The left-hand answer your research
column is labeled “record.” The right-hand column is labeled “respond.” question, your data
needs to be filtered
• Definition: be as specific as you can about elements around you that and organized in
would help someone unfamiliar with the site understand what is hap- ways that account for
pening. what your question is
• Sensation and Response: make note of specific ways your body feels asking.
in the space and which emotions arise.
• Questions: record any questions you are left with while at the site.
 120 Chapter 6

You may well end up with more observational data than you need—but
as you go back through your notes, you will begin to see patterns and trends
emerging from your observations, much like when you developed your cod-
ing scheme for discourse in Chapter 4. As you compose research memos
from each site visit (see Chapter 5), certain details will become important
as you group similar things together, examine outliers from what you ex-
pected, or reflect on your own reactions and feelings to what you saw. All of
those ways of assembling information provide evidence for answering your
research question and for understanding the way that places shape what
happens within them.

Places and Things Converge:

Mapmaking as a Method
So far, we’ve discussed some important places where words work to make
history (archives) as well as a method for recording the current impacts that
places have (site-based observations). Archival research and fieldwork are
privileged by researchers in both the humanities and social sciences, but
they both make meaning out of observation primarily by using words. As
we introduce this final method, mapmaking, we do so not because we ex-
pect you to be geographers or cartographers when you graduate, but be-
cause sometimes we see relationships and patterns more clearly when we
view them spatially and visually, not only verbally or textually. Maps enable
us to travel to places we’ve never been, and global satellite imagery allows

Try This Together: Analyzing Maps (30 minutes)

Go to The Decolonial Atlas (decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/) and “40 Maps that Will Help You Make
Sense of the World” (twistedsifter.com/2013/08/maps-that-will-help-you-make-sense-of-the-world/)
online. With a partner, choose five different maps from these sites. What are we supposed to pay at-
tention to based on what the maps highlight? What would each map be good for? What would each
map not be helpful for?
Working with Places and Things 121

us to view the world from a bird’s-eye view. For this reason, researchers in
many disciplines rely on maps to help them understand, explore, and answer
their research questions.
Making maps helps us see differently. Maps can be used to help us plan
information, as in an idea map during pre-writing stages, or they can help us
step back from a phenomenon so that we can see patterns and relationships at
a distance, as word cloud maps do. Mapping may be part of how we compose
field notes in order to orient ourselves or others to our places of research. Map-
ping as a method is a way of generating data visually and spatially that helps us
understand focal points, themes, and hierarchies.
Mapping can also be a way of visualizing location and movement of peo-
ple and things over time. For instance, let’s say that you’re working with the
research question we raised in the beginning of the chapter about the differ-
ences and similarities between reading love letters between two people who
lived a hundred years ago and reading a romantic textual exchange on some-
one’s phone today. While you might begin your project with worknets and re-
searching what has been written about the genres of letters and texts, mapping
the location and movement of specific letters and texts might give you some
different insight about the function of each that could help you answer your
research question.

Try This: Map Comparison (45 minutes)

First, hand-draw a map of the trees that you found on or near your campus when you completed the
“Try This: Identifying Campus Trees” exercise earlier in this chapter.
Then, consider that the process of moving back and forth between being in a the physical location and
looking at a map or satellite view is called ground-truthing among geographers and cartographers.
Ground-truthing cares for the ethical coordination of the direct sensory experience (finding trees
on campus, as you did) and checking those impressions against the aerial imagery, satellite view, or
perhaps a map you have created. Ground-truthing acknowledges that maps, too, warrant ethical con-
sideration and that maps change because the material world changes.
Finally, compare your notes from the “Try This: Identifying Campus Trees” activity with both the map
you made and a satellite view of the trees on or near your campus. What is similar? What is different?
 122 Chapter 6

Let’s say you’re working with the publicly published letters of lifelong part-
ners Simone de Beauvoir (who lived from 1908-1986) and Jean-Paul Sartre (who
lived from 1905-1980), whose correspondence spanned from 1930-1963. Let’s
also say you’ll be working with a series of a three-month-long text exchange
between you and your romantic partner. There are many ways you could begin
to try to answer this research question. On the one hand, you could use some
quantitative methods to help you understand these genres of exchange—you
might count how many letter exchanges each participant had in each genre and
compare the counts, or you might count how many letters were exchanged in
three months’ time and compare that number to the number of text messages
exchanged in the same amount of time. Or, you might use a qualitative method
by reading a sample of letters and texts and creating a coding sheet for discourse
analysis (see Chapter 4) that suggests some common (or uncommon) themes
that appear in both kinds of exchanges. On the other hand, you might map out
these exchanges. You might place each letter in a mapped location of the place
where they were at the time they were mailed, which might reveal interesting
points of comparison and contrast. Based on your knowledge of where de Beau-
voir and Sartre lived between 1930 and 1963, you might find that their corre-
spondence covered the time period of the Second World War and spanned loca-
tions throughout France and Germany when Sartre was a prisoner of war. You
might also chart where you and your partner lived in the three-month timespan
of your exchange, accounting also for the location of text messages in space,
pinging off of satellites. In this way, you are creating a location-based, or spatial,
map of time travel, distance, and discourse that might help you draw some dif-
ferent kinds of conclusions about letters and texts in the context of a romantic
relationship and in the context of the past and present.

Try This: Mapping Movement (60 minutes plus 1 day)

Try making your own map of time travel. In one 24-hour time period, document on a map of your
choice where you’ve traveled. On either a hand-drawn or online map and using locative images (dots,
lines, and arrows), reference where you were at what time of day during that 24 hours. What different
information do you generate when you capture your day on a map rather than on a calendar or daily
schedule of appointments?
Working with Places and Things 123

Maps not only help us see differently—in both words and images—but
they also can lead us to different kinds of realizations about our research and
can exist as important research methods to help us consider elements of dis-
tance, scale, scope, and movement. To that end, they should be seen as a com-
plementary method to site-based observations and hold much potential for
being included in your field notes. Maps can also help us recognize patterns,
themes, or focal points, and they can be created for audiences to help them
understand, navigate, or replicate a particular research site or process.

Focus on Delivery:
Curating a Collection
Whether you are working with a personal collection, a library archive, or a
collection of field notes or maps, inquiry into places and things frequently re-
quires assembling and curating a collection. Curation explores various group-
ings and patterns, and it often assigns numbering or naming systems so all
items in the collection can be referenced. Curated collections aid in making
research materials accessible and making patterns discoverable. To help places
and things become meaningful in a research context, curate a collection fol-
lowing these steps:
1. Select: choose the artifacts you will curate, or identify an existing
archive—this can be an old box of stuff, a journal, letters, a drawer of
old things, field notes, maps, a digital collection (of pictures, of social
media artifacts, of writing, etc.);
2. Preserve: take care of your archive—reinforce the box, clean old pic-
tures, back up digital work, label artifacts, and edit the components of
your archive;
3. Present: collect the work in this archive in a way that will allow you
to present it to the class—mount artifacts on a poster, in a book, in a
shadow box, etc.; although you’ve selected a personal archive, make
sure not to share parts of the archive that you do not want to be public
(within the class);
 124 Chapter 6

4. Analyze: compose an expository, narrative essay highlighting some of

the artifacts in this archive and what they tell us about you at that time
and place; and
5. Reflect: after you’ve composed your essay and developed the presen-
tation of your archive, consider how your work might inform future
primary research projects that address archives external to your expe-
rience.

Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. Letters to Sartre. Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare,
Arcade Publishing, 1993.
Blichfeldt, Malthe Emil, Jonathan Komang-Sønderbek, and Frederik Højlund West-
ergård. The Living Tree. Air Lab, IT University of Copenhagen, 2018. airlab.itu.dk/
the-living-tree/
Dublon, Gershon, and Edwina Portocarrero. ListenTree. MIT Media Lab, 2015. lis-
tentree.media.mit.edu/
Sartre, Jean Paul. Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de
Beauvoir 1926-1939. Edited by Simone de Beauvoir, Translated by Lee Fahnestock
and Norman MacAfee, Penguin, 1994.
Chapter 7. Working with Visuals
In the spring of 2020, the world was hit with an outbreak of novel coronavirus,
the likes of which had not been seen since the Spanish flu of 1918. What were
your reactions to the news of this global pandemic? Perhaps you were some-
one who didn’t pay much attention to the news until it reached the United
States. Perhaps you had been tracking the outbreak of COVID-19 as it spread
country to country. Perhaps you cancelled a vacation or had graduation plans
derail. Perhaps you made decisions based on what the news media was show-
ing you. Many political messages at first were quick to try to enforce social
distancing—staying home, keeping at least six feet between people when out
in public—to try to decrease the chances of infection. Social media was quick
to follow, propagating messages of best practices of handwashing and shelter-
ing-in-place. One of the primary things that both kinds of messaging depend-
ed on was a particular graphic, shown in Figure 7.1, that showed the spread of
the COVID-19 virus with and without the practice of social distancing.

Figure 7.1. Infographic created in 2020 by Esther Kim and Carl T. Bergstrom:
Flatten the Curve. Epidemic infographic created for the coronavirus
disease 2019 epidemic, but generally applicable for any pandemic.
125
 126 Chapter 7

This visual led both politicians and media professionals around the world
to circulate the call to “flatten the curve,” referring to the change in shape of the
parabola that represented the number of cases of COVID-19 with and without
controls like social distancing in place. The hashtag #plankthecurve was used
on social media by heads of state to try to encourage these safety measures.
After a certain point, the visual itself no longer needed to be used to back up
this call, and “flatten the curve” itself became the calling card for engaging in
social distancing behavior to slow the pandemic.
This is just one example of the ways that visuals help us think and persuade
differently and shows why they are a central method to helping us work with
and think through data. Due to an ever-expanding variety of digital technol-
ogies for supporting the production of visuals, contemporary scholarly re-
search tends to make greater and greater use of elements such as photographs,
graphs, tables, and data visualizations. Photographs are realistic images cap-
What does it mean
tured with the aid of an instrument (camera) that translates light to a repro-
to slow down in the
context of research
ducible inscription. Graphs and tables are devices for visually rendering sets of
for you? What areas numerical and textual data. And data visualizations is the term used to name
of your work can other visual readouts or ways of presenting data through visuals, usually with
afford to move slowly, the assistance of a computer.
and at what cost? Generally, as guiding principles, this chapter reinforces the following tenets:
How might you plan
for slowing down
1. Slow down in the production and reproduction of visuals.*
parts of your research Whether finding and selecting visuals made by others or produc-
process? ing your own, the choices we all have include common rhetori-
cal considerations—such as audience and purpose—and design

Try This Together:Visuals that Persuade (30 minutes)

With a partner, come up with a list of five visuals that have been used in recent memory to persuade a
public audience to take action. Together, answer the following questions:
• What are the major visual components used (photographs, graphs, tables)?
• What are the major textual components used?
• Where did the visual circulate?
• Why do you think the image circulated as it did?
Working with Visuals 127

considerations—such as size, placement, orientation, technical de-

tail, and legibility. Photographers, illustrators, and graphic designers
assume careful, reflective stances toward their production processes,
and so, too, should you.
2. Subject visuals to peer review processes much the same as you
would with written prose. The careful, reflective stance noted above
often begins by creating a series of drafts and a set of possibilities. A
photographer will take several more photos than they will use, then
screen the photos, sometimes in consultation with a client, to select
photos that depict most effectively the photo’s subject. You can achieve
the same effect by using a peer review of visuals to measure their effect
for an audience.
3. Develop visuals with attention to accessibility by providing descrip-
tive text and nuanced captions. Every figure, photograph, illustra-
tion, map, table, and graph must include a handle (e.g., Figure 1 or
Table 1), a caption (a brief explanation of the visual), and, if you are
working in an online environment, descriptive text (a lengthier, more
detailed explanation of the visual) that will assure accessibility for
assistive readers. We’ve developed this tenet with greater elaboration
further along in this chapter, but we have included it here because it is
essential to working with visuals.
4. Think about the relationship between the visual image and the text.
When working with visuals, writers must decide whether the image is
leading the text or the text is leading the image. This question is also
known as the imagetext problem for its inquisitive premise: which leads,
which follows? If the image is in the lead, its position is likely to be more
prominent, perhaps opening the section or appearing at the beginning.
If, on the other hand, the image follows, or merely reinforces the text,
its position in the document corresponds. It’s also possible for image
and text to share significance and to work in tandem, each balancing or
somehow lending deepened significance to the other. The point here is
that when working with visuals, you need to think about the question of
a relationship between image and text. Style systems, such as MLA, may
require a sequence where the image only appears after it has been men-
 128 Chapter 7

tioned in the text. But we regard this as a judgment call that ought to be
made in each situation. When image and text are used together, their
arrangement and proximity are important to readers engaging with and
ultimately understanding how they fit together.
5. Consult design experts when possible or seek resources on spec-
ifications for the best possible display of visuals for print and for
screens. Many experienced artists, designers, and photographers have
taken the time to share their wisdom online, preparing and circulating
articles and modules on adjusting image size and resolution, position-
ing the subjects in images for desired effects, working with appropri-
ate file types, and more. We mention this because, when beginning
research, many decisions involving visuals you will make have already
been made by others, and they can help you. We encourage you to
search online for how-to guides, video tutorials, and workarounds for
whatever you might encounter.
6. Give images the same credit-giving citations that apply to textual
sources. When working with images, regard them as the property of the
person who created them. Give credit where it is due (see Chapter 2 on
ethics), usually in the caption or by-line, but if not, then in a works cited
or references entry. Every image you re-use in your own work, whether
you found it online or in printed form, must be accompanied by an at-
tribution. While it’s true that such attributions require time and atten-
tion to detail, they perform an important ethical function, honoring the
source of the image and showing regard for the originator.
This chapter introduces working with visuals primarily through the use
of photographs, reserving some discussion of graphs, tables, and data vi-
sualizations for the end, and concluding with guidance for developing an
information graphic.

Photographs
With the rise of digital photography over the past two decades, high quality
images have become a swift, everyday form of communication. Consider how,
Working with Visuals 129

from the start of the twentieth century until the rise of digital photography,
film cameras required their users to very selectively take photos, carry the film
to a development counter or send it to a processor, then wait a couple of days
to see whether the photos yielded the desired results. Much scholarly contem-
plation of the medium of photography took place during the film-based era
when development was slower and when photographs were costly and scarce.
But contemporary digital photography now makes it possible to swiftly and
relatively easily create photographs and incorporate those photographs into
written research in mere minutes. This ease raises important questions about
the ethics of photo manipulation (touch-ups), cropping, and a growing variety
of image-based fakes, though practices of full disclosure head off these con-
cerns for researchers who work with visuals.
Although much has changed for photography, many useful ways of think- Rhetorical circulation
ing about photography have endured. For example, in his well-known book names the movement
on photography, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Bar- of discourse, taking
thes examined a series of photos that could be grouped generally into two into consideration
materials, timing, and
sets: press photos and personal photos. Press photos were those circulating
audience uptake. Such
widely on the front pages of major newspapers. Personal photos circulated circulation is often-
very differently in that they were oftentimes treated like family heirlooms, times mixed and un-
privately stored for safekeeping and only occasional viewing. Barthes’ dis- even, occurring across
tinction between press photos and personal photos is still applicable today digital and physical
as a way to begin thinking about circulation. Many photographs hold value media, immediately
for the person who took them, but they don’t bear out the same rhetorical and also with delay,
circulation,* a phenomenon you might uncover in a visit to the archives. and among intend-
An important point to consider in this context is that just because you value ed and unintended
a photograph personally doesn’t necessarily mean it will be meaningful in a audiences.

Try This: Personal and Press Photos (20 minutes)

From a social media platform where you have an account, choose one personal photo you have pre-
viously shared. Then choose one press photo used on the website of your city’s main newspaper. Con-
sider who has access to each of these photos and how they circulate. What do online spaces offer to
our rethinking about the personal value of photos? What has the rise in digital handheld photography
meant for re-defining the personal and the press photo?
 130 Chapter 7

research context. Writers (revising with input from audiences) establish that
significance, usually with direct explanations.
As an analytical framework for describing photos and accounting for
their meaning, Barthes introduced a useful vocabulary in his discussions of
the terms studium and punctum. Studium is, generally, what many viewers
of a photograph see. It may describe what the photo is generally about. The
Big Picture blog from The Boston Globe (www3.bostonglobe.com/news/
bigpicture) is an excellent resource for noticing studium. Consider, for ex-
ample, a press photograph of a state fair. The studium, generally, would
convey an impression of carnival games, regional agriculture, and festive
crowds of people. Punctum, on the other hand, is a highly personal intensi-
ty, that which stings or captivates the viewer. Again, in the case of the state
fair photograph, punctum is idiosyncratic. It could be the acute noticing
of an especially pleasurable (or terrifying) ride, a memory of cotton candy,
or a fixation on a mud puddle in the background that someone associates
with a childhood visit to a local fairgrounds. In Barthes’ influential work
on photography, studium and punctum were terms he offered that were
helpful for distinguishing between what is generally viewable (shared) in
the experience of a photograph and what is only noticed in the visual field
(mine alone). We have recalled these terms in part to remind you that ter-
minology used to describe film photography can still be applicable to digital
photographs.
Theoretical frameworks like the one Barthes introduced can be helpful as
you begin thinking about how photographs connect with research projects.
Among your first decisions about photographs will be whether you will be
working with your own photographs or using photographs taken by others.
Each scenario leads to a related set of questions and considerations:

Try This Together: Studium and Punctum (15 minutes)

Revisit the personal and press photos you chose in the prior activity. How do the concepts of studi-
um and punctum operate in each one? As you talk through your photos with a partner, consider
how your discussion helps you think about what is shared and what is singular in the experience of
viewing photographs.
Working with Visuals 131

If You Are Taking Your Own If You Are Using Photos Taken By
Photographs* Others A photograph’s
orientation refers to
• Consider technical features: lighting • In addition to considering technical its longest dimension.
and positioning, orientation, size and features, make careful note about If vertical, the long
file format, and number of photos. who took the photograph. dimension is up and
down the page. If
• Will the photos need to be resized for • Where did the photograph come
horizontal, the long
print or for display on a screen (or from? Is it part of a larger archive?
dimension is side to
both)? Will they need to be cropped? Is it part of a series? Be sure to keep
side.
careful records about its context.

Try This: Working With Selfies (45 minutes)

In precisely what ways are emojis discursive? Discursive means language-like, so, in this sense, the
question asks whether emojis are more like words and sentences (units of discourse) or more like im-
ages (non-discursive or extra-discursive units).
Choose three facial expression emojis. In only a word or short phrase, label the emotion you associate
with the emoji. Next, take a series of selfies in which you try to match the expression of the emoji.
Organize the emojis, their labels, and the corresponding photographs into a table. This work can be
shared with a partner, a small group, or the entire class. After sharing, consider together some of the
following questions:
• What is the relationship among emojis, language, and selfies?
• Are there expressive emotions inadequately conveyed in the current set of emojis?
• Scroll through your most recent text messages. How many emojis do you find in the last ten
messages? How many photographs? How many words?
• If emojis are aptly communicative, should they be welcomed into academic discourse? Why
or why not?
This final question has potential as a research project. For example, one could develop an interview or
survey for students or teachers of writing that asks about attitudes toward emojis. Or, you could take
a short piece of writing you’ve done and introduce emojis into it, then ask readers to describe their
experiences reading it. Just by noticing a phenomenon and being curious about it, research questions
(and potential projects) begin to take shape.
 132 Chapter 7

In certain cases, the subjects of the photos must give permission to be pho-
tographed, though this is not the case for what has emerged as a popular type
of digital photography, the selfie. With a growing body of academic research
about selfies and an ever-expanding trove of examples available online, it is
increasingly clear that photographing oneself is a popular practice.

Cultural Implications of Photography

Research writers who take photos or who use photos must be fully aware of
several ethical considerations. This is a significant part of most specialized
training in photography, but it is easily overlooked by novices. We have ad-
dressed research ethics in more detail in Chapter 2. Here, however, we want
to acknowledge that when taking photographs, researchers should always
seek permission, as it would be a trespass against individual sovereign-
ty to presume approval without asking. In addition to being careful when
working with protected groups, as noted in Chapter 2, researchers should
remember that cultural values relating to photography vary and must be
honored at all times. When someone’s worldview (cosmology) differs from
your own, you must seek explicit consent before taking photographs of peo-
ple, sacred sites, ceremonies, or rituals, including all variations of perfor-
mance (dance, worship) and making (weaving, cooking). When signs are
posted that no photography is allowed, these community standards must be
respected and followed.

Six Specific Types of Photographs

Researchers Use
Researchers may use several types of photographs for different reasons, and
in this section, we’ll expand briefly upon a few. We’ve associated the types of
photographs we discuss and the reasons for using them with example photo-
graphs taken along the Lake Michigan shoreline at Ludington State Park in
Ludington, Michigan, a place that lends itself to a range of research questions,
the most central being, What are the implications of rising Great Lakes water
levels and a resultant disappearing coastline?
Working with Visuals 133

Memory (Recall)
Photographs can help researchers remember details, collect visual samples,
and build a record of the context for the samples they collect. For an every-
day example, consider the research involved with finding an apartment. Sure,
rental companies may provide generic photos online, but taking photos as you
look at a series of three or four apartments can help you recall and distinguish
their key features. Which one had the purple front door? Which one had an
accessibility ramp still being built? These are not usually photos that will be
featured in published research, but they nevertheless operate as a potent form
of note-keeping. Such photos can also be paired with field notes to help create
a more detailed picture of a field site. In addition to being useful for note keep-
ing, photographs can be an aid to invention, helping us notice phenomena in
the world that help us generate researchable questions.
For example, consider Figure 7.2, a photograph taken at the edge between
the forest and the dunes in Ludington State Park along Michigan’s western
coastline. The photograph documents a well-trafficked transition point where
the wooded overgrowth changes to an open, rolling vista of sandy grasslands.
The photograph records this location as data, aiding the recall of a hiker who
will want to find the trailhead again on the return hike.

Scene-Establishing (Locative)
As an extension of the field work and site-based observations introduced in
Chapter 6, on-location photographs can reveal surrounding factors affect-
ing a great variety of people and issues in the world. A simple photograph
of a roadway, for example, can reveal to civil engineers key features of a
site study for a prospective project. The same photo can spotlight for an
environmental biologist the profile of plants and animals in the immediate
vicinity of the road project. It can also pinpoint other seemingly mundane
but highly relevant details about signage, sign placement, and visibility.
Scene-establishing photographs help us list and record what is at a des-
ignated location. Paired with other instrument-oriented information, such
as soil sample analyses or surface slope measurements, scene-establishing
photographs can provide insights into a wide variety of problems, from
road hazards to environmental impact.
 134 Chapter 7

Figure 7.2. Forest-dune transition at Ludington State Park, Michigan. As the

woodlands change over to dunes alongside Lake Michigan, a steep, sandy
embankment functions as a trail for hikers to travel. Recording a location like
this with a photograph can aid memory. (Image credit: Derek Mueller)
Working with Visuals 135

In some fields, scene-establishing photography has taken to the sky and

now includes satellite and drone imagery. From these wide scope vantage
points, researchers can observe patterns affecting entire regions. Figure 7.3, for
example, shows a view of the Lake Michigan coastline facing north from the
Big Sable Point Lighthouse in Ludington State Park. The vantage point pro-
vides perspective on a changing landscape, as water levels in the Great Lakes
have in recent years been rising, resulting in coastal erosion and pooling water
inland, both of which impact everything from species habitats to recreation.

Figure 7.3. Lake Michigan’s changing coastline. At what rates do the water,
sand, and foliated ground shift, and which encroaches on the other over
time? This view facing north from atop the Big Sable Point Lighthouse
in Ludington State Park in Michigan sets in relationship landform
variations where water and land meet. (Image credit: Derek Mueller)

Schematic/Technical
In research contexts, schematic photos provide plain views useful for assembling
complex objects. Schematic photos may help explain the relative sizes of one piece
 136 Chapter 7

of equipment and another device, or they may, with labeling, provide a guide for
quickly reconnecting something like a portable sound system, a desktop tele-
phone, or a computer. Schematic photos are especially common as aids to tech-
nical illustration and user documentation for technical and professional writers.
The schematic/technical photo featured in Figure 7.4 (on the next page)
includes in it crucial details about a specific product made by Sealite, a marine
equipment company, complete with model number and inspector decals. The
image shows a highly technical device essential to waterway shipping safety.

Artistic/Aesthetic
An artistic or aesthetic use of photographs is usually chosen because they look
appealing, because they attract attention to a project, or because they set a
Artistic/aesthetic
mood or elicit a particular feeling, association, or desire. Artistic/aesthetic*
photographs can
also be selected and photos are commonly featured in the slide decks used to present research. For
incorporated into example, a presentation about research on the uptake of ideas, or how ideas
research publications catch on and spread, might use as a metaphor for such a process a photograph
to focus the audience of a mature dandelion about to be carried off in the wind.
on a particular asso- To decide on appropriate artistic/aesthetic photos, consider making a list of
ciation and to impart concepts or themes that resonate with the research you are doing. These can be
a lasting impression—
metaphors, but you should be careful not to choose metaphors that are overly fa-
whether by interest-
ingness, color scheme,
miliar. Doing so can create an impression that the ideas illuminated by this work
or subject. rely on tired or long-established commonplaces rather than introducing new and
distinctive ways of knowing. The list of concepts or themes you generate provides
you with keywords to search for photographs online. Notice how the meaning
of Figure 7.5 would change if the image were paired with a tired pun (“Life’s a
beach”) rather than a catchy and inviting tourism catchphrase in a public rela-
tions campaign context (“Wander specific”) or a more stark and ominous forecast
in an environmental sustainability context (“Michigan’s vanishing shoreline”).

Try This: Working with Images and Metaphors (45 minutes)

Returning again to your own research question(s), take or locate a photograph that engages your study
metaphorically. What metaphors connect your research to ideas you believe will be engaging to your
audience? How clearly and compellingly do you think the photograph elicits these associations? Why?
Working with Visuals 137

Figure 7.4. New LED lighting technology in use. Although the Big Sable Point
Lighthouse located in Ludington State Park in Ludington, Michigan, was built
in 1867 and has illuminated night skies at Michigan’s western shoreline for
more than a century, the sources of light are smaller today than they once
were due to light emitting diodes, or LED lighting. Here, atop the lighthouse,
the mismatch of new, smaller technology and older infrastructure is visible only
up close; freighters navigating the coastline after dark experience the light’s
guiding twinkle much as they did before. (Image credit: Derek Mueller)
 138 Chapter 7

Figure 7.5. Big Sable Point Lighthouse, Ludington, Michigan. The lighthouse is
framed in this case as an attention-getting device, and an aesthetic photograph
like this one could be used to express everything from serene themes—such as
summertime recreation, beaches, and hiking—to more serious themes—such
as historical restoration, the disappearing coastline due to climate change,
and the environmental impact of tourism. (Image credit: Derek Mueller)

Interaction
Interaction photographs seek to capture moments or events where interaction
is visible and observable. We welcome you to consider a great range of possible
interactions that are relevant for a research project. For example, an interac-
tion photograph could feature two trees, thereby calling into question how
they interact, share resources, and connect underground where their root sys-
tems and fungal networks make contact. Another example of an interaction
photograph could be a picture of a pair of barn swallows, a species of birds
noted for their distinctive relationship patterns and habitats. Perhaps most
obviously, interaction photographs can also feature humans. In the social sci-
Working with Visuals 139

ences, especially, photographic evidence of human interactions sets in sharp

relief the intricacies of physical and material surroundings, expressions, and
embodiment. Consider Barbara Rogoff ’s study of children and how they learn
by observing and interacting with older children and adults. In the book she
wrote about this study, Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in
Social Context, she included many interaction photographs. This is but one
example of many where photographs spotlight interactions and thereby lend
insights into the social nature of learning.
Continuing the inquiry into the photographic data available for under-
standing changes at Ludington State Park, Figure 7.6 spotlights symbiotic in-
teractions at the water’s edge and in the precarious zone between the lake itself
and the forest.

Figure 7.6. A Monarch butterfly interacting with milkweed plants. Acres of

protected greenspace along Lake Michigan’s shore in Ludington State Park in
Ludington, Michigan, provide habitat that sustains essential interactions between
Monarch butterflies and milkweed plants. Milkweed contains a poisonous, milky
substance that the Monarch can digest, though this makes the Monarch poisonous
to its predators, thereby protecting it from predation. (Image credit: Derek Mueller)
 140 Chapter 7

Time Series
Photographs have also been used in conducting and presenting research to in-
dicate a time series, or changes in a variety of subjects over time. Perhaps the
best-known example of this comes from advertising, where before and after
photographs of human subjects attest to the validity of some product, usually
a diet plan or anti-aging cream. Aside from these commonplace examples,
however, researchers have used photographs to study change at intervals. For
example, as Marta Braun detailed in her book, Picturing Time, French physiol-
ogist Étienne-Jules Marey used time series photography to study the phase by
phase movements of several subjects, such as a pelican and a human runner.
His inquiry into physiological time series also led to early instrumentation
now used for measuring heart rate, a development that created a foundation
for modern Western medicine. Time series photographs can also illustrate
environmental change, showing, for instance, how farms fluctuate over time,
how forests manage their shared resources (with and without human involve-
ment), or how rivers change course due to flooding, drought, and irrigation.
Photographic evidence can powerfully augment written accounts of a partic-
ular question or phenomenon. In the case of Figure 7.7, the photograph is not
yet paired with a before or after shot, but as a form of data, it lends time and
location-specific evidence of trail flooding in late June at Ludington State Park.
How long does this inland flooding last? How many of the last five or ten years
has the trail been flooded during the tourism season? A time series photo-
graph would establish data connecting the location to different moments in
time, thereby helping us inquire into patterns of interest to park rangers, legis-
lators, tourists, taxpayers, environmental biologists, and more.

Positioning, Captioning, and Organizing Images

As a general design principle, unless otherwise designated by a formal style sys-
tem, such as MLA or APA, or by a set of explicit instructions, you should position
images adjacent to the text that makes reference to them. Every figure or im-
age, inclusive of photographs, should be accompanied by a figure reference, also
known as a handle, and a caption, as we have done throughout this chapter. An
example is provided in Figure 7.8. The figure reference, or handle, is a necessary
Working with Visuals 141

short-form reference that makes it possible to refer to the image from the text.
Images lacking a figure reference, or handle, lack an address and therefore can
lapse into a faint, inexact relationship with what’s written about them.

Figure 7.7. An underwater trail marker. According to park rangers,

inland pooling has in recent years become more frequent, creating
challenges for maintaining safe and sure hiking trails between the
lighthouse and the campground. (Image credit: Derek Mueller)
 142 Chapter 7

Figure 7.8. Key parts of a caption.

When incorporating more than one image, include sufficient space so that
the images and their captions are grouped visually. It should be clear which
caption belongs to which image. For reasons of contrast and comparison, it
is common for photographs to appear in pairs, especially time series photo-
graphs. When presented this way, photographs can prove generative for their
striking differences. Juxtaposition names the relationship between two pho-
tographs intentionally selected for their strongly pronounced differences. The
pairing can point sharply to a key concept or theme, commanding attention
and setting a lasting impression.
When developing captions for photographs you have taken or images you
have composed, remember they are authored elements that require careful
writing, revision, and proofreading and that they require particular elements
that become an essential part of preparing a document that is maximally

Try This: What are Other Uses for Photos? (30 minutes)
Research contexts vary greatly, and we recognize there are uses for photography in research beyond
the six types we have sketched here. This observation lends itself to a researchable question: How do
researchers use photography or photography-related instrumentation (e.g., video, satellite imagery) in
an area of study that interests you? How could you learn more about the possibilities or limitations of
photography in your area of research interest? Having followed these lines of inquiry, even provision-
ally, are there any types of photographs you think should be added to the six types we have introduced?
Working with Visuals 143

accessible. We’ve already mentioned that every figure should begin with a
figure reference, or handle, such as Figure 1, which is one of these elements
needed for accessibility. After the handle, the caption should include a brief
description. The language from this description is also appropriate for the im-
age’s alternative text when developing online materials, websites, and so on.
After the brief description, an additional sentence or two can detail what ap-
pears in the image and address the image’s purpose. Think of this as an elab-
orated description and rationale. Finally, depending on the style manual you Many contemporary
are following, you might need to include an image credit. With these four el- photos online in
ements (figure reference, brief description, elaborated description and ra- various places (social
media, blogs, some
tionale, credit)* captions will reflect the ethical regard of a researching writer
news sites) fail to
who has honored every reasonable standard for this essential element. All of include all four of
the captions up to this point include each of these essential elements. these elements in
Although we have focused primarily on the use of photographs and their their captions. What
relationship to words in a text, we invite you to consider other multimodal do these absences tell
elements that might enhance your composition, such as graphs and tables. you about the ethos
Although figures and tables require different in-text citation, similar recom- of the photographer?
mendations for considering the image-text, graph-text, or table-text relation-
ship apply. A final consideration when working with figures, graphs, and ta-
bles is organization and file naming. Usually original image files are stored
separately, outside of the document where you are writing. With this in mind,
we recommend creating an online folder for the entire research project where
you can store figures and tables in their original format. Research writing with
images or tables usually doesn’t become too snarled with complexity when
there are only one or two visual elements. But because projects like these can

Try This: Understanding Juxtaposition and Captioning (30 minutes)

Using an online image search database, locate two images you find intriguing, compelling, or other-
wise generative for reasons you can explain that also reflect a quality of juxtaposition, the condition of
inventive spark due to contrastive pairing. Write captions for both images. Then develop a paragraph
using appropriate figure references, or handles, to account for how you understand the juxtaposition
to be working. What effects, specifically, does this pair of images elicit? Include the vocabulary of
“studium” and “punctum” if you find it helpful for discussing the photographs and their significance.
 144 Chapter 7

expand to upwards of dozens of images, we recommend exercising care with

file naming to stay organized. We encourage you to include basic, consistent
information in your file naming as follows: 1) chapter, section, or page number
where the visual appears, if applicable; 2) figure or table reference with num-
ber; 3) an abbreviated descriptive name; and 4) if you are collaborating with
others or working in multiple sections or chapters, some way of identifying
yourself with the file.
For example, the file name for the second figure in this chapter would best
be presented in the order of chapter, figure reference with number, descrip-
tion, and contributor last name, or 7-fig2-memory-mueller.jpg. If the original
file was saved in a special format, it would also be advisable to retain that file
as a base version, such as 7-fig2-original.psd. The base version should be off
limits to modifications. To make a change, create a copy of the file and adjust
the new version. The integrity of the original file can prove vital at later stages
of a project’s development, such as when publishing.

Working with More Visuals

Graphs and Tables
Just as with photography, graphs and tables are prone to being underexamined,
hastily applied elements even though they are highly specialized elements
justifiably associated with quantitative research, statistics, and data analytics.
Quantitative research usually undertakes knowledge-making from the stand-
point of numbers-driven ways of understanding the world. Quantitative re-
searchers, in other words, use counts of things (measurements, tallies, counts
of responses) to express knowledge about phenomena in the world. Therefore,
graphs and tables, as common expressions related to quantitative research,
also play an important part in qualitative research. Our point in mentioning
this is to acknowledge that all researching writers may have cause to introduce
graphs or tables for displaying information useful to a research project. You
do not need specialized training in statistics or data analytics to incorporate
graphs and tables into your research; although, with that said, an introductory
Working with Visuals 145

course in statistics can help researchers in all fields understand more compre-
hensively a wide variety of ways of knowing along a complementary, contin-
uous spectrum. It is important to note that though they may portray similar
kinds of data, graphs and tables are often handled differently in style manuals.
For example, in MLA style, tables are numbered and include a title above the
table, while figures, including graphs, are numbered and include a caption be-
low the figure.
Graphs and tables have in common a basic orientation to numerical and
arrayed (or list-like) data. Tables, such as the one shown in Table 7.1, show data
sets as labeled rows and columns convenient for specific look-ups. Note also
how the title precedes the table, while graph titles are located below, as with
other figures. Graphs, such as the one in Figure 7.9, organize such data into
models that lend themselves to discerning comparisons using basic lines and
shapes positioned on a grid. Graphs typically rely upon a strict system of ref-
erence (the grid) so they can present with accuracy and consistency positions
of values (i.e., addresses) and proportions of geometrical shapes or lines indic-
ative of value. It is quite common for tabular, or table-based, data to also be
presented as a graph. Why? The varied forms alter perspective and can thereby
heighten attention to meaningful, significant dimensions of the data. Which-
ever form the data takes, graphs and tables are different possible expressions
of data designed with an interest in effective communication. Researching
writers who rely upon graphs or tables oftentimes pair these graphical ele-
ments with textual accounts in the form of captions and textual passages. This
premise is vitally important for researching writers who work with visuals:
the image (photograph, graph, table) and text (caption, surrounding discus-
sion)—when developed effectively—are complementary and interdependent.
Each needs the other to compel understanding, assent, and action in response
to the research.
Extending from the example of the campus tree inventory in Chapter 6,
Table 7.1 presents a series of three annual tree censuses from one Midwestern
public university. The table shows accurate quantities in rows and columns
that aid quick reference. It also raises questions it does not answer. For exam-
ple, although the adjusted figures (in parentheses) show a net gain, the table
does not include details about how many trees were planted or removed.
 146 Chapter 7

Table 7.1 Campus Tree Census Table

It can feel like twice

the work to have
Figure 7.9. A sample bar graph.
both image and text
operating in tandem, Tables and graphs often work in tandem with one form, the table, pro-
but these echoes viding granular and specific information, and with the other form, the graph,
and iterations supply presenting a visual argument based on a synthesis of the data that may also
readers with depth
indicate evidence for trends, clusters, or other patterns. In this case, the tree
and dimension that
census data from the table in Table 7.1 is aggregated, or combined, across all
form the basis of
research writing. three years. The added variable (trees removed) allows viewers to compare
how many trees were planted, how many were removed, and where the overall
Working with Visuals 147

census stands in 2021. A graph like this might be useful for a presentation to a
decision maker about the goals for the next three years.
When you choose to work with graphs and tables alongside textual ac-
counts, we recommend seeking a balance between the explanatory power of
each. In certain situations, it may be best to adopt with purpose an imbalance,
whereby the textual account leads into the graph or table, or, perhaps the op-
posite is better, whereby the graph or table leads into the textual account.*
Whichever the arrangement, you should notice this as a deliberate design, be-
cause you, as a researching writer, have command over the sequence.

Data Visualizations
Data visualizations is a term used for a large set of graphical forms for display-
ing data, usually (but not always) with the assistance of computers. Technically,
the graphs and tables featured in the previous section are long-established and
relatively stable types of data visualizations. Tables visualize data, relying on la-
beled rows and columns to aid the lookup and cross-referencing of multivari-
able datasets. Graphs also present data visually, translating numbers into shapes,
plots, trend lines, and more. As online tools bloom for presenting data visually,
researching writers are presented with a vast number of possibilities for using
programs, platforms, and applications to elicit patterns. We urge care and cau-
tion when adopting data visualization processes. They can add value, but they
can also downplay key details or bury the processes by which they are made.
When using a computational process to visualize data, it is the responsibility of

Try This: Graphs and Tables (45 minutes)

Locate a contemporary image of data that has been graphed in your local newspaper. Spend 20 min-
utes reconstructing that data into a table, giving it an appropriate figure reference and caption. In a
paragraph, reflect on what, if any, differences you perceive by changing the data’s presentation in this
way. Is such a change possible when you aren’t working with data from your own, original research? Is
the data more or less compelling after the change? Do you think the media outlet responsible for the
publication considered multiple ways of presenting the data before it decided to publish the version
you’ve worked with?
 148 Chapter 7

the researching writer to learn about how the visual is made and to disclose that
process before celebrating what can be a spectacular readout.
Think of the growth of data visualization tools today as motivated by the
same questions that inspire tables and graphs. What patterns are brought to
light by a particular treatment? Why and for whom are these patterns mean-
ingful? In effect, data visualizations should bridge data and the stories you, the
researching writer, consider to be at the heart of insights into your research
questions. Data visualizations can help writers tell their stories, either deep-
ening patterns or revealing anomalies (breaks from patterns) and their signif-
icance. Let us illustrate through three examples ways data visualizations have
influenced how we think about specific research questions.
Figure 7.10 is the work of three researchers who collected and coded 154
timely warning crime bulletins circulated at one university over eight years. As
required by the Clery Act, also known as the Jeanne Clery Act, all United States

Figure 7.10. Night and Day. A radial diagram displays eight three-hour blocks
of time using differently sized circles at the tip of each to indicate the number
of crime-reported instances corresponding to each marked off timespan.
Working with Visuals 149

colleges and universities must promptly disclose criminal activity in official

channels of communication. The research team coded the collection of docu-
ments (see Chapter 4 for more on discourse analysis), noting the days and times
of the incidents as compared to the days and times of the reports sent out by
the university, and as they worked, questions about timing and its effects began
to emerge. A vast majority of crime incidents occurred between 9 p.m. and 3
a.m., but the news of these events was distributed during daytime working hours
when the university’s public relations office opened, resulting in something like
an echo effect, whereby the events themselves and the news of the events played
around the clock. The research team also coded for the ways the alleged assail-
ants were described in the timely warnings. Here, too, patterns emerged. The
patterns were compelling, indicating that 72 percent of the timely warnings
attributed criminal activity to a vaguely described assailant whose description
was nevertheless associated with race, as shown in Figure 7.11. The full study,
these findings, and the discussion of consequences related to these patterns are
available online in Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society (see Pantelides,
Mueller, and Green, “Eight Years a ‘Wooden Opponent’”).

Figure 7.11. Vague Threats.

 150 Chapter 7

The data visualization shown in Figure 7.11 reflects prominent sources of

data. The first, on the left, introduces a year-by-year count of timely warn-
ings that make reference to an assailant identifiable on the basis of race. The
second, on the right, aggregates the year-by-year data, applying it to a human
profile color-coded and divided to indicate the disproportionately high rate of
timely warnings naming black or African American assailants.
Because Figures 7.10 and 7.11 appeared in a published article, the data visu-
alizations evolved slowly with input from reviewers and editors. Through sev-
eral drafts and revisions, the versions you see here were made. These visualiza-
tions spotlight relationships among quantitative data, emergent patterns, and
design choices. In each case, the visualization amplifies data-backed assertions
that inform the key conclusions advanced in the full article.
The next example of a data visualization,* Figure 7.12, is a census pictograph
tied to an inventory of trees on campus. Much like Table 7.1 and Figure 7.9, cre-
Data visualizations aid
ating this data visualization helped us develop our research questions. Working
researching writers
and their readers with an online report online, students translated the data into a pictograph using
focus on the most sa- two tree type icons in different colors to show the proportion of deciduous trees,
lient, striking insights coniferous trees, diseased trees, and newly planted trees on campus grounds. De-
arising from careful veloping a data visualization like this might seem too obvious or boring; however,
work with data.

Figure 7.12. Campus tree census.

Working with Visuals 151

working with visuals this way adds a striking visual impression to quantitative
data. In Figure 7.12, two types of tree icons are color-coded to reflect the percent-
age of deciduous and coniferous trees on campus, as well as the proportion of
diseased trees and newly planted trees corresponding to each major type.
Census pictographs such as Figure 7.12 blend conventional graphing formats,
such as bar graphs or pie charts, with icons to create a layered visual readout at
the juncture between the abstract and the concrete. They communicate neither
purely numbers nor purely objects. Instead, in the blended format, quantitative
data is brought nearer to the world in which it matters tangibly or in which it
applies. This connection between the abstract and the concrete can help us notice
important patterns, put a fine point on the implications of research findings, and
generate new research questions. Census pictographs can be applied extensively,
but they are especially impactful in the context of surveys (see Chapter 5), such as
when collecting results from a social media survey, a poll of your classmates, or
set of questions you develop that are IRB-approved and that you circulate.
Because time management and accountability for time is a great challenge
upon your arrival at college or university, our third and concluding form of
data visualization relates to time use diaries. An example of this sort of visu-
alization is show in Figure 7.13.

Figure 7.13. Time use diary of a science major. Weekly time is divided and
color-coded by class subject, meal times, study time, and personal time.
 152 Chapter 7

A time use diary enables a bird’s-eye view of how a person spends time
that does not depend on the same level of detail as found in a daily to-do list
(which might include exactly which books you have to read as you study or
which food items you ate for breakfast) or a yearly calendar (which might
block out special days like holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries). Time use di-
aries show a snapshot of time and allow you to code and understand, from a
middle view, where your time goes.

Try This: Developing a Pictograph (45 minutes)

Plan a draft of a census pictograph based on credible statistical data you locate online. The data could
be related to any field or specialization you wish (possibilities include bee ecology and hive health
rates, small business startup success rates, publication acceptance rates for journals in your area of
study, and much, much more). Hand-draw the pictograph. What design choices, colors, and icons
would best suit the data and why? Reflect in a paragraph why you made the choices you did and what
might have to change or adapt when revising a hand-drawn image into a digital version.

Try This: Developing a Time Use Diary (60 minutes plus 1 week)
For this activity, begin with a simple spreadsheet or table for recording hours of the day and days of the
week. Then, complete the following steps:
1. Develop a system for entering into each cell how you plan to spend the time. What labels will you
choose, what colors, what symbols, and what will they mean?
2. Using a copy of the same grid, enter into each cell a note or symbol accounting for how you
actually spend time as the week proceeds. Color-code the cell to indicate simply whether your
planning matched with the actual activity.
3. Write vignettes about the system, noting particular hours that were or were not harmonious with
your planning.
Over a week, you will have developed an insight into how well-aligned, or felicitous, are your plans and
your activities throughout the week.
Working with Visuals 153

Looking Again at Working with Visuals

In this chapter, we have introduced a few of many possibilities for working
with visuals. We have done so in a way that we hope underscores opportuni-
ties for research about and with visual rhetorics as well as for the creation of
research documents that feature visual elements, such as photographs, graphs,
tables, and data visualizations. As you work with visuals and explore those
possibilities, we encourage you once more to return to the list of key principles
established at the beginning of the chapter:
• Slow down with the production of visuals.
• Subject visuals to peer review processes much the same as applies to
the development of written prose.
• Develop visuals with close attention to accessibility by providing de-
scriptive text and detailed captions.
• Think about the relationship between the visual image and the text.
• Consult design experts when possible or seek resources on specifica-
tions for the best possible display of visuals for print and for screens.
• Apply the same level of credit-giving citation practices to images that
apply to textual sources.

Focus on Delivery: The Photo Essay

A photo essay includes a series of photographs that are used to tell a particular
story. These essays can be photo-heavy, using only figure references and brief
captions to tell a story, or text-heavy, balancing images with paragraphs of
explanations. Either way, a photo essay has a narrative arc, or storyline, that
informs a reader of a particular message that they should interpret from the
images used.
Using your research question developed throughout Chapter 1, create a
photographic essay that brings your research question and some possible leads
for inquiry into view. You and your instructor can choose to what degree you
want this essay to balance image and text. Some options for blending your
 154 Chapter 7

research question and images for the photo essay follow:

• Pull a set number of images (with careful attribution) from online
databases, and order them in a particular way that lends insight into
your researchable question, giving you a few directions or leads to
help you move it forward.
• Blend online images with those that you yourself take to reflect your
research process or data you’ve begun collecting.
• Create a photo essay made completely of photographs you take that
reflect one or more stages of your research.
• Compose a photo essay featuring photographs of all six types detailed
in this chapter that have to do with your research question.
Select just one type of research photograph and then create or find six pho-
tographs of that type that shed light on your research topic.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard
Howard, Hill and Wang, 1981.
Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (18230-1904). Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1995.
“The Jeanne Clery Act.” Clery Center, clerycenter.org/policy/the-clery-act/.
Pantelides, Kate, Derek N. Mueller, and Gabriel Green. “Eight Years a ‘Wooden
Opponent’: Genre Change (and its Lack) in Campus Timely Warnings.” Present
Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016, www.presenttensejournal.
org/volume-5/eight-years-a-wooden-opponent-genre-change-and-its-lack-in-
campus-timely-warnings/.
Rogoff, Barbara. Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context.
Oxford UP, 1991.
Chapter 8. Research and the
Rhetorical Forms It Takes
• Your 5th grade science fair experiment
• A viral video of high school math students rapping the quadratic
formula
• A five-minute conversation with a family friend about a summer co-
op position at their company based on your community service

These are all ways that research circulates over time, in different locations,
through interactions among people and things. This chapter takes into ac-
count the ways that research, oftentimes research-in-progress, circulates. Cir- Effective research
culation* is a contemporary reframing of the rhetorical canon of delivery. moves into and
Delivery, in a classical Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, was primarily con- throughout the world.
cerned with speakers who, in real-time, stood before reasonably attentive au- Delivery and circula-
diences to speak persuasively about matters of civic concern. Over two millen- tion pinpoint how this
nia, as writing systems gained legitimacy and as digital media expanded and movement happens.
flourished, so too did the means of delivery multiply. In today’s mediascape,
delivery remains relevant, but the mechanisms of delivery have shifted be-
cause audiences are themselves producers of recirculation and uptake. That
is, someone may read an article and re-post it, watch a video and send it on.
Secondary circulation is not a new phenomenon, but it has intensified with the
rise of social media and the everyday documentary impulses that proliferate
streams of social media. People have their mobile devices out, capturing and
relaying the richness and wonder (and also ordinariness and banality) in their
surroundings.
To put a finer point on this phenomenon of secondary circulation (i.e.,
uptake and recirculation), Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss introduced
the concept of rhetorical velocity. As they explain, rhetorical velocity goes
beyond delivery to offer “strategic theorizing for how a text might be recom-
posed (and why it might be recomposed) by third parties, and how this recom-
posing may be useful or not to the short- or long-term rhetorical objectives of
155
 156 Chapter 8

the rhetorician.” For a researching writer, this means sharing research in such
a way that encourages others to do things with it, including to recirculate it.
When others take up the work and continue its circulation, rhetorical velocity
increases. The reach and influence of the research stands a greater chance of
making a difference in the world.
With the goal of setting research in motion, this chapter begins by ac-
knowledging and then challenging two powerful myths connected with
research writing. The first myth is that researchers should only share their
work with audiences at the end of a research process. The second myth is
that beginning researchers should circulate their work only in small circles,
to limited audiences, such as the confines of a class and a teacher. Of course,
myths emerge from the world around us. These myths in particular about
research writing prevail because there are strong cases to be made for cir-
culating research after the study is fully formed and the work completed.
Furthermore, circulating research-in-progress to small, supportive, attentive
audiences, such as are customarily available in association with a writing
class, also makes sense. These myths prevail, in other words, because there
are kernels of long-established wisdom etched into them. And yet, we seek
here to open these myths with the goal of acknowledging what becomes
available when we share about works-in-progress and when we engage audi-
ences broader than the classroom.
Our aim in challenging these myths is to expand perspectives on the po-
tential of rhetorical delivery to clarify and activate research activity as it un-
folds. Toward this goal, consider our counter-principles:

Try This Together: Delivery and Circulation (30 minutes)

In a small group, develop definitions of delivery and circulation. How are these terms similar? In what
ways do they identify something different? What do you think they mean for researchers who are in-
terested in sharing their work with others?
Discuss how you have participated in rhetorical circulation. That is, have you ever read or viewed
something, then passed it along to someone else with the purpose of asking a question, teaching them,
deepening their understanding, or changing their mind?
Research and the Rhetorical Forms It Takes 157

1. You can, as a writing researcher, share about your work at any mo-
ment in the process. You can write a pre-proposal in which you sketch
possible lines of inquiry. You can prepare and deliver a three-minute
presentation to your class or your research group at the moment when
you are beginning to gather, read, and annotate sources. You can devel-
op for a gallery crawl a draft of a poster that displays decisions you have
made about research design, including the questions that interest you
most and the potential complications you foresee. With each of these
(and many other) possibilities, research is kept social, and the interac-
tions can be generative for you, for your research team if you are collab-
orating, and for others who are probably working through comparable
research processes themselves.
Delivering the beginning stages of a work-in-progress early and
often can help you refine your sense of audience and purpose. The
questions you receive will help you make decisions about where to
expand, what context to fill in, and what is missing or perhaps un-
derstated. It’s also possible to revisit a research project long after you
believe it was finished and sent off into the world. Five and ten-year
retrospectives—look backs—at a research project and asking of it
freshly—Why did this work matter? What would I have done differ-
ently? How would a comparable study need to be done now, were it
to be undertaken again?—these and other reflective questions help
researchers focus on the longevity of a study’s significance, setting it
in relationship to time as well as opening new possibilities for con-
tinuing or renewed research.
2. You can, as a writing researcher, share about your work widely,
even while it is in-progress or otherwise unfinished, generating
and circulating status updates that invite audience engagement.
It may feel risky, yet writing about in-progress research can open
your work to outsider feedback, lead to potential collaborations,
and build confidence in how you give language to specialized con-
cepts. This is not quite the same as saying you should share every-
thing about the research with other people or that you should post
everything about it online. But some measure of practice with deliv-
 158 Chapter 8

ery and circulation while a project is underway can help you see it
as rhetorical work, connecting it with people who are curious about
it. When this happens, research writing can become connected to
other stakeholders.
We also want to stress the careful consideration that must go into
sharing in-progress work, as this ties in with the discussion of ethics in
Chapter 2. Ethical delivery of in-progress research may be focused and
invitational, such as by selecting a narrow issue in a study and invit-
ing perspective. It may also proceed with a goal of keeping your work
public facing, or aimed toward an external audience, and accountable
to people who are not researchers but whose lives may be improved
The rhetorical ap- by the questions you are asking and what you are learning about those
proach to research questions. Ethical delivery of in-progress research seeks to emphasize
inquiry we have mod-
the value of audiences who can participate in the work. We would cau-
eled seeks to keep
porous and open the
tion you against disclosures of frustration or complaint about your re-
seemingly bounded search process or findings, though missteps, failures, and complications
limits of the writing certainly do happen in research and warrant acknowledgement when
classroom and the we are sharing about our work. Finally, a leading goal for wide delivery
arbitrary time frame of in-progress research is to refresh perspective on the classroom as a
of a semester or temporary scene. Research activity often exceeds the length of a semes-
quarter. ter or quarter.*

Try This Together: Brainstorming Delivery (15 minutes)

With a partner and using your research topic, question, data collected, or project thus far, generate a
list of five to ten ways that you might share in-progress work.
Be sure to consider different kinds of stakeholders—not just your campus community, but your neigh-
borhood, city, hometown, government, workplace, educational, and community groups. Who is af-
fected by your research, and who might want to know a bit more about it? Who would you like to have
in an audience that would help you think differently about your research? Then, consider what forms
sharing such in-progress work might take. What are some flexible delivery options that an in-progress
project might have that a fully finished project does not?
Research and the Rhetorical Forms It Takes 159

The Rhetorical Forms Research Takes

Form usually refers to shape and structure. Certainly there are shapes and
structures that have become conventional in interpersonal communication, in
workplace communication, in civic and legal communication, and in academ-
ic communication. Rhetorical forms, or genres, reflect shapes and structures
that have evolved to reflect the values of a particular discourse community.
For example, for a legal briefing to be recognizable as a legal briefing, it must
assume the shape and structure of legal briefings that have circulated before
it. Such a document reflects the unspoken values and expectations of a legal
discourse community—the lawyers, judges, and clerks whose communication
practices constitute this significant domain of activity. Missing the mark on a
particular form risks alienating the discourse community; straying from for-
mal conventions can mean offending important people among the document’s
audience.
Form becomes rhetorical when it takes into account the communication
situation: purpose, audience, context (including forms that have come before
it), and timing. This means that form is slightly flexible; rather than adopting
a universal, fixed, unchanging view of form, it’s better to regard shapes and
structures as living, evolving entities. Savvy, effective communicators (rhetors)
take this into account each and every time they write. Noticing the evolving
qualities of forms, as well as opportunities for new forms that make use of all
varieties of media, amounts to rhetorical awareness. And it is with rhetorical
awareness in mind that we undertake in the remainder of this chapter to intro-
duce general conventions for forms associated with research writing: the IM-
RAD (an abbreviation for Introduction, Methods, Results, And Discussion)
research report, the short form presentation, and the research poster.

The IMRAD Research Report

Research reports are the most common form for research delivery and circu-
lation. Although they are written documents primarily constituted by words,
they often include graphs, charts, photographs, or figures (see Chapter 7). It
is customary for research reports to introduce and contextualize the study,
 160 Chapter 8

lay out the study’s methods and findings, and discuss its consequences, which
can include applications, proposed action steps, and prospects for additional
research. The scope, or length, of research reports can vary, ranging from ab-
breviated reports of a few pages, sections, or installments, to larger reports of
a few pages, to elaborate accounts of 25 pages or more. What we hope to make
clear is that there is no one-size-fits-all research report. Research reports are
often similar to one another; however, as rhetorical situations change, often
reports do, too. It’s important to note conventions are a starting place from
which your research writing can adapt to specific situations.
As a general framework for research reports, or what are sometimes called
research papers, consider the IMRAD research report as one common model.
In many STEM-oriented disciplines, the IMRAD report stands out as a basic
form. Some have argued it is too basic or too reductive. It is crucial to ap-
proach the IMRAD report as an exceedingly basic structure onto which other
more nuanced choices should be applied. Many IMRAD research reports will
include the four basic sections of introduction, methods, results, and discus-
sion as subheadings, as this can aid readers in finding their way. Here we de-
scribe what goes into each of those sections:
• Introduction: The opening section of a research report establishes
the purpose, or rationale, for the research that follows. It can do this
by stating an opportunity (or gap in the research), a problem the
research responds to constructively, or a question or series of ques-
tions the research answers or deepens. Opportunities, problems, and
questions work differently from one field to another, yet they can mo-
tivate research in any field. Given this situation, researchers should
introduce their work by orienting it to discipline-specific contexts
and problems.
• Methods: Methods sections account for research design, detailing the
choices that go into the ways the researcher has worked. Methods may
note timeframes, techniques for recording and coding data, and the
methodology—the values backdrop that makes your approach trans-
parent to your audience and to yourself (see Chapter 1). Discussing
the methodology signals an understanding of disciplinary values, con-
necting your choices to choices that have been made by others in related
Research and the Rhetorical Forms It Takes 161

research. Coding schemes (Chapter 4) and research memos (Chapter

5) help establish a record of activity that may inform a methods section.
• Results: The results section of an IMRAD research report details what
happened as the methods were enacted. A results section aligns neat-
ly with laboratory experiments or computational scripts that may be
run once, adjusted, and run again. Results, in such cases, can vary. The
broader view of results is, in effect, what happened. Results sections
account for the activity that followed from the methods presented in
the previous section.
• Discussion: Discussion is where meaning is opened up and explored.
Discussion sections simply and directly attend to questions of conse-
quences by asking, So what? This is the section of a report where the
research writer interprets the results and makes a case for the results
as significant, limited, or altogether failed. Especially when results are
limited or failed, there are ample opportunities for renewing questions,
refocusing prospective studies, and really learning—establishing new
knowledge that can be insightful for stakeholders.
Several research report variations stand out in relation to the IMRAD
report once this simple shape and structure is established. In some human-
ities disciplines, texts themselves are the primary form of data. Working with
texts—interpreting them, putting them into conversation with one another,
and analyzing them for significance—can amount to a research essay. There
are also variations of the IMRAD report where interpretation and argumen-
tation take center stage, though the introductory and discussion sections con-
tinue to honor the basic functions we’ve outlined here.
Because research writing is diverse, no single genre can account for the myr-
iad variations you may encounter—whether as a reader or as a writer. There
are a few features, however, that distinguish research reports from other genres.
Research reports almost always include a references list, or a list of works cit-
ed. References lists (see Chapter 3, bibliographic phase) provide readers with a
comprehensive listing of all sources mentioned in the report. The list makes an
ethical gesture—both of giving credit where it is due and of providing readers
with a good faith guide they can follow for tracing and finding any source they
wish to inquire into more deeply. In some fields, it is also common for research
 162 Chapter 8

reports to include footnotes or endnotes—relevant, detailed asides that deepen

and contextualize some added dimension of the text. Appendices are another
common feature of research reports. They are used for including more than the
report itself can reasonably incorporate within a specified scope. An appendix
is a companion document supplied by the research writer to provide access to a
readily available reference, such as reference to a raw data set (e.g., the full script
of an interview or supplemental photographs).

Short Form Presentations

Much like practice with writing, practice with presentations frequently leads
to greater fluency, proficiency, and effectiveness. Presenting helps you hone
your own sense of what is appropriate in any given situation and makes you
more aware of choices related to timing, the use of media, and audience inter-
action. Presentations are a rhetorical form for circulating research—whether
that research is in its planning stages, well underway, or completed—because
they are tailored for a particular audience in a particular place and time.

Try This: Exploring Manuscript Guidelines (45 minutes)

Publishing venues commonly stipulate the forms of research reports they accept. Many predefine a
scope, a style system (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.), and a stance on the use of footnotes and appen-
dices. Identify one to three publication venues you think might be receptive to publishing research
writing like yours. You might start with some of the journals that you came across in your source-work
(Chapter 3) or that you have found in your research in the past. Locate the manuscript guidelines for
these journals. Which qualities of the document are strictly prescribed? Which appear to you to be
less clearly defined? For each publication venue, make a two-column list, with one column identifying
strict guidelines and the other identifying features or qualities more loosely determined or not men-
tioned at all.
Try This, Too: Local Publication Venues (30 minutes)
Does your university have a publication venue for the research writing done by undergraduate stu-
dents? First-year students? Students nearing graduation? Graduate students? Identify these publica-
tion venues. How often does this publication come out? What sort of writing is published in it?
Research and the Rhetorical Forms It Takes 163

Since the early 2000s, short form presentations have caught on in a wide
range of fields, from engineering and computer science to rhetoric and de-
sign. Short form presentations are sometimes called pitches. Perhaps the best-
known type of pitch is the elevator pitch,* named for its duration approxi- When preparing and
mating the time it takes to tell someone on an elevator about something you delivering an elevator
are doing, selling, or working on. Even the longest elevator ride is only a few pitch, or a short form
minutes. Elevator pitches, then, are purposefully bound at only a few min- presentation, rhetor-
utes. Presenters delivering elevator pitches have a short timeframe to get to ical considerations
of audience, purpose,
the point, deliver a key premise or two, or pose a couple of questions, perhaps;
timing, and context
ultimately, they must keep it short and sweet. are paramount.
Several other short form presentations have gained notoriety in recent
years. The PechaKucha presentation, a model devised by engineers who were
impatient with needlessly drawn out presentations, is usually made up of 20
slides, each set to automatically rotate after 20 seconds. This makes for a 6
minute, 40 second presentation. Ignite presentations work similarly; these
are five minute presentations with automatically advancing slides. Twenty
slides advance after 15 seconds each, making for a five minute pitch. And the
Three Minute Thesis presentation, popularized first at Queensland University
in Australia, comes in at strictly three minutes using one slide.
Whatever the specifications for a short form presentation, we urge an
awareness of the rhetorical considerations consistent with other forms of com-
munication—audience, purpose, timing, and context. Effective short form
presentations focus only on one or two major ideas; they are spare in that they
are long enough to offer only a provocation or provide only a slice of a research
study, which then stages the possibility of more expansive discussion.
We want to highlight a few additional considerations as you undertake a
short form presentation yourself in order to highlight the idea that research
can be shared or circulated at any moment in its development:
1. Slide decks for digitally-enhanced presentations are composed.
They are written, assembled, arranged, and configured with regard
to specific audiences and purposes. Because slide decks are written,
they should be developed with rhetorical consideration and care that
reflects the choices of the presenter and an awareness of audience. This
means paying close attention to the number of words, to the spare and
 164 Chapter 8

purposeful use of images that give appropriate credit to sources, and

to the choices that go into typeface, spacing, and color coordination.
None of these features should be shrugged off as unimportant, for the
slide deck carries with it the ethos of the presenter.
2. The presentation itself is only a part of the purpose. It’s true that
the presenter delivers information, sharing details about the research
process and findings, but the presenter is also responsible for setting
the tone for the kind of conversation they want to have after the
presentation. Presenters should encourage questions and answers,
perhaps by including a slide at the end that invites questions, wheth-
er general or specific.

Try This: What Makes an Effective Short Form Presentation? (30 minutes)
Look into the short form presentations listed here: PechaKucha, Ignite, and Three Minute Thesis
(3MT). See if you can find online one presentation adhering to one of these formats that you consider
to be effective for any of the following reasons:
• the clarity of its main point or central idea
• its use of typeface and spacing
• its use of color and images
• the relationship between the language of the speaker and the language on the slides
• the question or questions posed in the presentation
Identify one of these qualities and describe why you think the presentation is rhetorically effective on
this basis.
Try This,Too: Presenting Visuals (45 minutes)
As you consider possibilities for focusing and developing your own short form presentation, return
to Chapter 7: Working with Visuals. Which visuals do you think would align well with your presen-
tation? Why? Identify up to three visuals and write rationale statements for why they would make a
worthwhile addition to the short form presentation you are developing. If you choose photographs,
what are some advantages in taking or choosing to work with your own photographs rather than lo-
cating and incorporating images you find online?
Research and the Rhetorical Forms It Takes 165

3. Short form presentations can be integrated and coordinated for what

are sometimes called group presentations. When teams of researchers
collaborate on a research project, group presentations can be an oppor-
tunity for them to share information about their roles and the intricacies
of their work insofar as they shaped the study and conducted dimensions
of the research. Short form presentations also work well for coordinated
panels and roundtables, leaving sufficient time in classes or conferences
featuring such presentations for conversation and discussion.

Research Posters
Research posters are yet another common rhetorical form used for delivering
and circulating research. Research posters can put on display central claims
and assertions, questions or lines of inquiry, and provisional findings and
snapshots or slices of data. They might pick and choose among data presented
in words or presented visually, such as in graphs, charts, tables, and infograph-
ics (see Chapter 7). They may even re-format IMRAD report findings visually.
Posters reflect design choices that impact typeface and size, spacing and posi-
tioning, figures and captions, and references.
In some disciplines, posters reflect a widely shared grammar, or pattern. This
means that a sample of posters will reflect similar features. In other disciplines,
however, design choices reflect greater variety, and, as such, no two posters ad-
here to the same formula. Research posters can be designed for a great range of
shapes and sizes, from minimalist formats, like 11x17-inch flyers, which don’t
allow for much content, to 48x36-inch posters, which can feature greater num-
bers of images and higher word counts. It is hard to generalize about all posters.
Some research posters, for example, have been remediated for digital environ-
ments, which means there are so-called digital posters in circulation that blur
distinctions between large PDF documents, web sites, and slide decks.
Many posters are put on display during what are called poster sessions, or
scheduled events during which presenters stand or sit nearby the poster while
attendees browse as if making their way through a gallery. One advantage of this
model is that the researcher who created the poster is nearby for talking con-
versationally about the research. But this real-time interaction also means that
 166 Chapter 8

posters should be designed thoughtfully with regard to legibility (large text and
understandable images). Posters browsed in a gallery setting should also be direct
about questions or provocations, even highlighting the takeaway for those who
are interested in learning about the study, its status, and its prospective insights.

Expanding Forms
In addition to research reports, short form presentations, and research post-
ers, many other rhetorical forms have extended the reach and circulation of
research beyond classrooms and campuses. Some universities host research
fairs where researchers share their work using mixed forms—websites, pod-
casts, dioramas, brochures, pamphlets, short documentary videos, handouts,
games, and zines. Working across these rhetorical forms is called multimodal
transformation, for it recognizes and takes seriously (and sometimes play-
fully, too) the principles that research should circulate widely and also that
the widest possible circulation benefits from recompositions between one
form and another. Making good use of a wide array of choices for present-
ing research, both in-process and finished, can help researchers discover new
audiences and connect with prospective stakeholders and can also generate
rhetorical velocity for researchers as others reformulate their findings as well.

Focus on Delivery: Developing

a Research Poster
Research posters* involve considerations of timing, audience, and purpose.
When developing
How much time do you have to develop the poster and for how long will it be
a research poster, on display? Who is likely to see the poster, to ask questions about it, to engage
what do you want with it while you, as its maker, are or are not present? What goals do you have
the audience to see? for the poster? Do you want it to provide an update, to pose questions, to share
To remember? To ask results and analysis, or to pose possibilities for future, related research? These
about? To learn? generative lead-ins should help you begin to sketch out a plan for the poster,
which can then shift to secondary considerations that are more practical and
applied, related to size and materials.
Research and the Rhetorical Forms It Takes 167

In terms of sizes and materials, a crucial consideration from the outset is

whether you will design the poster to be printed as an entire work or whether,
instead, you will work with smaller pieces (e.g., standard sheets of paper cut and
pasted or taped into place). For printed posters, PowerPoint, Google Slides, or
other slideware can provide you with a canvas, which you can size to the desired
specifications and output as a PDF. When working with one of these programs,
we recommend beginning with a white background and black text, as these de-
faults match best with standard paper colors and high contrast printing results.
Before you commit to creating a poster digitally to later save it as a PDF for
printing, look into printing options on your campus or nearby. What printing
options are there? What will it cost to print the poster? What else will you
need to have on hand to assure that it stands upright during the poster presen-
tation? Will you need tape or tacks? Will there be an easel? These seemingly
rudimentary details about displaying a research poster are the responsibility
of the presenter putting it on display. Neglecting to attend to these important,
practical details can lead to surprising costs, or, even worse, the unfortunate
situation of not being able to display your poster on the day of the session.
Standard poster boards are 22x28 inches or 24x36 inches, while medium
display tri-folds are 36x48 inches. Because these sizes are variable, the first
time you create a poster, it may be best to work with smaller elements that you
attach to the board. This strategy gives you options for focusing on specific
elements if you decide you need to make an adjustment once you display the
poster.
At a minimum, a research poster should include
• a prominent title
• the researcher’s name and contact information (email address, at a
minimum)
• a handout or a link to references
Other options for content on a research poster include
• a statement about the purpose for the research, including the design of
the study and provisional findings
• up to two specific assertions, insights, or discoveries realized through
analysis
 168 Chapter 8

• up to two specific limitations, constraints, or shortcomings encoun-

tered while undertaking the study
• up to two questions or prospective possibilities for further research,
including next steps
• at least one visual element, such as a photograph, graph or chart, table,
or infographic (see Chapter 7)
As you develop your poster, remember that those who read it will almost al-
ways be viewing it from a distance of three to five feet, so larger typefaces (e.g., 24
point) and high contrast color choices (e.g., no yellows, pinks, or light blues) will
give your poster the best chance of communicating effectively to the audience.

Works Cited
Ridolfo, Jim, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical
Velocity and Delivery.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol.
13, no. 2, 2009, kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo_devoss/index.html.

Try This: Creating a Research Methods Glossary (1 hour or more)

Throughout this book, we have boldfaced several keywords and phrases we consider significant for
gaining practice with research methods. In some cases, the boldfaced words are accompanied by an
in-text definition. In other cases, the keyword or phrase is boldfaced but the definition is implied
within a section or chapter's broader context. And in yet other cases, the term may warrant more care-
ful searching--defining keywords as an act of research. Rather than provide a fixed glossary, we offer
this final Try This as an invitation to develop your own research methods glossary. You might build
the glossary and compile its definitions working only with the boldfaced terms, or you might explore
beyond the bounds of this book to introduce other relevant vocabulary. You might build the glossary
individually, as part of a working group, or as a class. And you might build the glossary quickly or
over many weeks or months, returning to established terms and definitions to fine tune them based on
your experience with research writing and informed by all you are learning. We invite you to try this,
in this way, because we consider writing a glossary to be an act of composing that is generative and
that is well matched with the most rewarding possible engagements with research writing.
Acknowledgments
• Figure 3.6. Alonda Johnson.
• Figure 3.7. 3D worknet model by Alonda Johnson.
• Figure 7.1. Image created by Esther Kim (@k_thos) and Carl T. Berg-
strom (@CT_Bergstrom). Obtained through Wikimedia at https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flatten_the_curve_-_coronavi-
rus_disease_2019_epidemic_infographic.jpg. Used under a Creative
Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
• Figure 7.10. This figure was previously published in Kate Pantelides,
Derek N. Mueller, and Gabriel Green, “Eight Years a ‘Wooden Op-
ponent’: Genre Change (and its Lack) in Campus Timely Warnings.”
Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016,
www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-5/eight-years-a-wooden-op-
ponent-genre-change-and-its-lack-in-campus-timely-warnings/ and
is reprinted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommer-
cial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
• Figure 7.11. This figure was previously published in Kate Pantelides,
Derek N. Mueller, and Gabriel Green, “Eight Years a ‘Wooden Op-
ponent’: Genre Change (and its Lack) in Campus Timely Warnings.”
Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016,
www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-5/eight-years-a-wooden-op-
ponent-genre-change-and-its-lack-in-campus-timely-warnings/ and
is reprinted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommer-
cial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

169
Try This: Research Methods for Writers
Try This explores interdisciplinary research methods employed in research in writing studies but rarely
drawn upon in undergraduate courses. This shifts writing instruction from a model of knowledge delivery
and solitary research to a pedagogy of knowledge-making and an acknowledgment of research writing as
collective, overlapping, and distributed. Each chapter is organized around methods to approach a particular
kind of primary data—texts, artifacts, places, and images. Accompanying “Try This” invention projects
in each chapter invite readers to “try” the research methods. Some projects are designed to try during
class time and take 5 to 15 minutes, while others are extensive and will take days to accomplish. Each
research writing opportunity introduced in a “Try This” invention project is designed to scaffold a research
project. Each chapter offers different genres that allow research to circulate and connect meaningfully with
audiences, including digital research posters, data visualizations, and short-form presentations.

Jennifer Clary-Lemon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests
include rhetorics of the environment, theories of affect, writing and location, material rhetorics, critical dis-
course studies, and research methodologies. Derek Mueller is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing and Director
of the University Writing Program at Virginia Tech. He explores questions concerning digital writing plat-
forms, networked writing practices, theories of composing, and discipliniographies or field narratives related
to writing studies. Kate Pantelides is Associate Professor of English and Director of General Education English
at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research examines workplace documents to better understand how
to improve written and professional processes, particularly as they relate to equity and inclusion.

Practice & Pedagogy

Series Editors, Aimee McClure, Mike Palmquist, and Aleashia Walton

The WAC Clearinghouse

Fort Collins, CO 80523
wac.colostate.edu

University Press of Colorado

Louisville, Colorado 80027
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ISBN 978-1-64215-144-2