Research Methodology
(RM6001):
Academic Writing
Íde O’Sullivan and Lawrence Cleary
Regional Writing Centre, UL
www.ul.ie/rwc
Dissertation writing
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How will you organise your approach to
this seemingly sublime, looming task?
Ways of ordering
3
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Writing Process—Planning, Drafting,
(Discussing / Consulting), Revising,
Editing and Proofreading.
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Rhetorical Situation—part of the planning
stage and includes an assessment of the
occasion for writing, writer, topic,
audience and purpose.
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Writing Strategies—cognitive,
metacognitive, affective and social.
The writing process
Prewriting
 Drafting
 Revising
 Editing and Proofreading
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Prewriting
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Planning
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Evaluating the rhetorical situation, or context,
into which you write
Choosing and focusing your topic
Establishing an organising principle
Gathering information
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Entering the discourse on your topic
Taking notes as a strategy to avoid charges of
plagiarism
Evaluating sources
Planning: Assessing
the rhetorical situation
Occasion
 Audience
 Topic
 Purpose
 Writer
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Occasion
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What has prompted you to write?
What do I need to know?
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My guidelines tell me about procedures that I
must follow.
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What are my obligations?
What are the procedures?
When is it due? How much time do I have?
What’s involved?
When do I submit a proposal?
Do I need to submit project reports? When?
When do I submit my finished document? Do I need to
defend my discoveries orally?
What kind of project will I choose?
How do I write about it?
Occasion
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When we consider the occasion for
writing, we think about
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What has prompted me to write?
How much writing do I have to do?
How much time do I have to do it?
How much time should I allot for planning and
organising, and for drafting and revising?
What tone should I adopt? Formal? Informal?
Authoritative? Conciliatory? Assertive?
Audience
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Your audience affects how you write.
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Terms that need not be explained for one
audience, may need to be explained to other
audiences.
General audiences may not have your subject
knowledge, but they are usually thought of as
intelligent, thoughtful readers willing to be
informed or persuaded.
Your classmates make good audiences. Write
for them. Let them read your dissertation and
give you feedback on the ease with which they
were able to read and understand it.
Topic
Your topic is something that will have your
supervisor’s approval.
 Some things to think about:
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How much do you already know about this
topic?
How much am I going to have to know in order
to do this project and report on it? To say
something meaningful?
How much research am I going to have to do?
How much time do I have to do it?
Topic
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Strategies for choosing topics and
narrowing or broadening the coverage you
will give it.
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Taking suggestions from your supervisor
Brainstorming (individually or in groups)
Listing
Clustering or mind-mapping
Free-writing or discussing
Asking wh-questions—who, what, when,
where, how and why?
Topic
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Topics do not stand in isolation. They exist
in a context.
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What is the relationship of your topic to your
course of study?
What are people saying about your topic in the
literature you have read?
What are the issues of concern?
Purpose
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What is your purpose for writing?
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To express your feelings?
To inform?
To persuade?
As you draft, revise and edit, make sure
that every contribution to your report
works to realise that purpose.
Purpose
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If informing is the purpose of your report,
then the point of order is a triangulation of
your audience, your topic and your
purpose.
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Audience analysis
Relevance
Rhetorical appeals
Writer
What do I already know about this topic?
 How quickly do I learn? Read? Write?
 How much writing have I already done?
 Have I developed an academic or
authoritative voice?
 Have I addressed this audience before?
 What are my weaknesses? What are my
strengths?
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Drafting
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Try to visualise your report. Work toward
that vision.
Begin to structure it—establish your section
headings; give them titles. These do not
have to be permanent.
Examine the logical order of ideas reflected
in those titles.
Do not get hung up on details; elements of
the draft are subject to change in the
revision stage.
Start to write the sections that you are ready
to write.
Drafting
Continue to reassess your rhetorical
situation.
 Does what you have written so far
contribute to the achievement of your
purpose?
 Experiment with organisation and
methods of development.
 Don’t get bogged-down in details; focus
on the big issues: organisation and logical
flow.
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Drafting
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How should it look? Do you have a vision?
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What should the dissertation look like?
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Do you know what goes in each chapter?
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What chapters can you already title?
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Do you have a general idea of what they will
contain?
Revision
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Is your dissertation logically organised?
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A good way to check the logical flow of your
ideas is to outline your report AFTER you’ve
completed your draft.
How did you introduce your topic? By
giving it definition? Describing its
development? Explaining what it is?
 Does each section contribute to your
reader’s understanding of your topic?
Does your report service your purpose,
aims, and objectives?
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Revising
Outline each section. How does each
paragraph contribute to our understanding
of the topic of that section?
 Take a close look at paragraphs: Does
each paragraph have a central idea? Does
it have unity? Is it coherent and well
developed?
 Is there a correspondence between the
title of your report, your section headings
and sub-headings and the central ideas in
your paragraphs?
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Revising
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Do the methods used to illuminate your topic
lead to logical discovery?
No truths are self-evident.
Claims have to be defended with evidence.
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Processes have to be described and explained;
Design features and research methods have to be
justified;
The justification for generalisations and conclusions
need to be made explicit;
The criteria used to qualify our results also needs
to be explicitly put forward and evaluated for
objectivity;
Underlying assumptions need to be evaluated for
their objectivity.
Editing and proofreading
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Once the report is cogent, it must be made to be
coherent.
Work methodically, checking one feature at a
time.
Do not exclude formatting issues.
Editing and proofreading is more than just
grammar and punctuation; it is also about voice,
rhythm, tone, style and clarity.
Editing and proofreading
Check for ambiguity
 Check for comma splices, run-ons, stringy
sentences and fragments.
 Check for how sentences introduce new
information: is it in the beginning of the
sentence or at the end?
 Check that you use sentence types that
are appropriate for your discipline.
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Editing and proofreading
Check word order and usage. Are you
using an indefinite article when a definite
article is more precise.
 Check for agreement: Subject / verb;
pronoun or noun substitute / antecedent
or concatenation.
 Check for bias (gender, race, religious,
creed, persuasion, etc).
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Editing and proofreading
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Check for obstacles to clarity:
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Poorly chosen words
Vague references
Clichés and trite language
Jargon
Inappropriate connotations
Editing and proofreading
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Check for clarity:
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Effective subordination and emphasis
Sentence variety
Parallel structures
Choppy writing
Explicit logical links
Editing and proofreading
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Check formatting issues (appropriacy and
consistency):
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Margins
Font (size and style)
Section heading numbers
Paragraph style (block, semi-block, indented)
Editing and proofreading
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Check for plagiarism
 Check the form of your in-text citations and of
your full references in your References page.
 Check the content of your citations. Is
everything that should be there there?
 Check that paraphrases are not too close to
the original.
 Check that all figures, tables and graphs are
captioned and cited (below figures and graphs;
above tables)
 Check that any borrowed ideas, words or
methods of organising information are
referenced and clearly marked.
Logical choices and unity of purpose
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Every choice serves to defend a claim,
answer a question, or confirm a
hypothesis
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Word, phrase, sentence-structure
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Does the choice satisfy audience expectations
Does it speak to your authorial credibility
Does it further your argument, analysis,
Arguments & logic
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A good argument will have, at the very least:
 a thesis that declares the writer's position on the
problem at hand;
 an acknowledgment of the opposition that nods to, or
quibbles with other points of view;
 a set of clearly defined premises that illustrate the
argument's line of reasoning;
 evidence that validates the argument's premises;
 a conclusion that convinces the reader that the
argument has been soundly and persuasively made.
(Dartmouth Writing Program 2005)
Literature Review & logic
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Think in terms of your argument and the
support that you provided for claims:
 Include a review of all the literature that
you read to learn about your topic and the
particular aspect of your topic that you
focus on.
 Include a review of the literature on the
methodologies that you used.
Methodologies & logic
When you know what you need to know in
order to answer a question, then it is
logical to choose methods of inquiry that
will supply the reliable verifiable data that
you need in order to answer the question.
 Don’t forget to qualify your data—what
does it tell you and what is it unable to tell
you?
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Methodologies & credibility
All data has to be analysed. You need a
methodology for analyses as well.
 Quantitative data: can it be
generalised?
 Qualitative data: what criteria will be
used to establish its value?
 Do not overstate your results. An honest,
quality analysis will speak volumes about
your credibility, regardless of the quality
of the data.
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Unity and coherence
If information included in your dissertation
does not contribute to an understanding of
the value of your conclusions and
recommendations, then it only serves to
befuddle the logic of your piece.
 A unified text is a more coherent text.
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Writing strategies
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Map your paper
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What sections or subsections are
completed (keeping in mind you still have
to revise),
Pick one or two of the holes in your paper
that you would feel comfortable filling,
Assess the reasons for any anxiety you
have over the unfinished parts that cause
you anxiety
 Do you need to read more?
 Do you need to rethink your paper?
Writing strategies
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Outline your paper
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Devise headings and subheadings for
uncompleted sections
 This helps you see the logical
progression (or lack of it) of your ideas
 It identifies the main ideas
 It helps detect omissions
Writing strategies
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Write about why you are having difficulty
making advances in your paper…
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It gets the fingers tapping and the cerebral
juices flowing
An awareness of fears and anxieties helps
you to develop strategies to overcome
those emotional roadblocks
You may discover that the reason that you
are having difficulty is that there is some
chink in the logic of your argument that
you must either fill or that requires a major
rethinking of the line of reasoning.
Writing strategies
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Don’t allow yourself to freeze up. When
you are feeling overwhelmed…
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Satisfy yourself with small advances until
you feel more confident and unstuck
Seek help. Talk to friends. Talk about how
you feel, but talk about your ideas as well.
Eat lots of ice cream and candy
Works Cited
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Dartmouth Writing Program (2006) “Logic and Argument” [Online],
available: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/
student/toc.shtml [accessed 08 Jan. 2008].
Discourse Community Analysis (n.d.) “Discourse Community
Analysis Assignment Sheet”, Center for Writing Excellence, West
Virginia University [online], available:
http://www.as.wva.edu/~lbrady/202discourse.html [accessed 20
Aug. 2008].
Ebest, S., R., Brusaw, T., Oliu, W., and Alred, G. (1997) Writing
From A to Z, Mt. View, CA: Mayfield Publishing.
Glucksman Library (2007) “Cite It Right: Guide to Harvard
Referencing Style”, 2nd edition; University of Limerick’s Referencing
Series [Online], http://www.ul.ie/~library/ pdf/citeitright.pdf
[accessed 08 Jan. 2008].
University of Hertfordshire (2008) “Describing & Analysing
Language: Handouts”, University of Hertfordshire, School of
Combined Studies, BA (Hons) in English Language for Commercial
Communication [online], available:
http://www.uefap.com/courses/baecc/dal/handouts.htm [accessed
08 Jan. 2008].