Oxford Chapters 10&11

Justine Mack

Historical research is extremely important because it can be considered very reliable evidence to support and answer questions. When researching history you can find arguments created in history and find that the historian has intentions to convince the reader and/or move the reader to action. These arguments make the historians subjectivity obvious. Chapter 10 in The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors discuss in depth about historical research. When trying to make an argument about something like focusing on a certain type of data you can review history using published texts to find that people had more success in using more data based research. I personally like to use archival history in my own research. Archival material is simply primary sources, which exist nowhere else and weren’t meant to be published. Archival material can often be found in a writing center or even be work that you have done in the past. I feel a historical research project is a rather simple research project to conduct because many of the scholarly, peer-reviewed articles available for college students like myself are fairly dated. When starting historical research it is important to know why you’re conducting such research. In a writing center you may want to do research on the history of your writing center. If this is the case, you may want to begin with researching the history of writing centers and how others have conducted such research to determine what the best approach for you to begin this research would be. The main problem you might face in conducting this research may be that up until recently many writing centers didn’t have written records.

Chapter 11 in The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors focuses on the importance of empirical research. I personally like empirical research more than historical or theoretical research. Empirical research to me seems to be the most basic, cut and dry because it begins with a question, and then the researcher designs a process to gather the data that will allow him or her to answer the question. This process of conducting research ensures that your research is reliable and valid. The structure of any type of empirical essay will contain the following a statement of problem and review of research, description of method, results, discussion of data, and implications and limitations. Quantitative essays are one type of empirical essays; they focus on numbers to support their argument. Mean, median, and mode provide a concise way of analyzing trends in data. Another large part of quantitative essays is looking at the standard deviation, which tells you how far, on average, a score diverged from the mean—how far each piece of data is from the mean. Qualitative research focuses on qualities non-numerical patterns in data. When performing qualitative research the researcher systematically gathers descriptive data about the topic you wish to investigate then repeatedly review information looking for trends. Survey is commonly used when conducting quantitative research. They are also often used in writing centers to determine tutors performance. However, a survey is not a report on actual conditions but a report of the tutees views. Qualitative essays are particularly beneficial for writing centers because they channel narratives in a way that can be understood by a broad audience. In order to get the best results out of a survey there is a lot of prepping to do before, during, and after conducting your research. For the best results you have to ask questions that elicit precisely the information you want to gather. I have run into the issue where my survey questions have been worded wrong and my respondents didn’t answer the question in the exact way I need them to, therefore I gathered the wrong information. Another popular method of empirical research in writing centers is discourse analysis. Discourse analysis is the means by which researchers explore the many different elements of communication that is occurring simultaneously in any communication event by focusing on naturally occurring language. I feel discourse analysis is the most important type of research because if there is a lack of communication in writing centers then a tutoring session can fail completely.