Kleine Article

Zachary Trimm

Writing and Rhetoric

31 August 2012

Reading Response pp. 22-32

In “What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One- and How Can We Get Students to Join Us?” Michael Kleine wants to change the way students do their research papers. According to Kleine, when most students go to do research they merely copy down information pertaining to the subject the paper is about and mesh it together. That is a problem. Research should be done to critically think about a topic, to come up with new questions about a topic, to answer existing questions about a topic, and to form a position on that topic. Kleine says that the methods students use while researching leads to them not thinking the subject through. Therefore, Kleine wanted to do his own research on how people go about researching, using college professors with experience at writing research papers as his subjects. His studies showed that the research process was more effective when the researcher enjoyed the topic that he/she was exploring. Kleine shares his discoveries not only to help students out with a possible better way of researching and applying data, but also encourages instructors to change lesson plans, to allow students to do assignments on what interests them so that their minds can be free and more useful.

Kleine’s article is a lot like the previous article we read, “Argument as Conversation: the Role of Inquiry in Writing a Researched Argument” by Stuart Greene. The idea of a “researched argument” from Greene is much like what Kleine wants to get across to his audience. Both writers state that in research you can go after what you specifically need in getting data or you can gather as much data as possible and use what you can. While Greene referred to these methods as “two different views of research” (Greene 19), Kleine argues that both methods are used together in the research process, depending on the circumstance. Also, both authors believe that at least one good question should be the focus of the research and the writer must attempt to answer. Greene refers to this as “framing.”

I have many thoughts after reading this article. It was very interesting because of the imagery depicted in the “night library” scene. I could instantly get a picture in my head from scheduled class sessions in my high school library and most of the students, including me, were just like the ones in Kleine’s vision. I didn’t know how to deeply research. I wasn’t coming up with thoughtful questions about a topic. All I was worried about was finding a good amount of sources in different forms (books, internet, etc.) and getting as much information as possible. Then I would get stuck when writing the paper because I had all this information and no idea how to piece it together. Having read this article, I feel the sense of purpose from doing a research paper that I didn’t get from my high school teachers. They usually told us exactly what to write about with the topic, but I probably would have gotten a more interesting experience if I could choose whatever I wanted to write about within the topic. Kleine says teachers should let students pick their own subjects to research, and in some classes that might be fine, but in others I think the teacher should assign what to research but don’t limit students on what intrigues them about the topic.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling (QDJ)

#1) The “night library” vision that Kleine describes is the most relatable part of the article. That was the way I went about my research while I was in high school. I gathered as much information as I could about the topic, but I hardly thought of the topic as something to answer a deep question about. In my research, I was more of the “gatherer” and not really a “hunter,” and Kleine describes being both at the same time in order to become an effective researcher. Sometimes when I do try to be a “hunter,” I don’t always find what I’m looking for and I get discouraged. When I was a “gatherer,” I thought I was doing well because I had a lot of notes and data but when it came to writing the paper I went blank. However, without Kleine’s methods I still managed to get good grades on papers that I turned in.

#3) In Kleine’s research, he interviewed many professors to get his information. It was important to him to question instructors from many different fields so he could see if there were and preferences among areas and to compare and contrast them. In my research experiences, I tried to get reliable sources from books and journal articles and internet websites to get different perspectives and see which sources had the same information so I’d know it was more credible. One of the differences between Kleine’s research and my research is that he had primary sources from the professors while I mostly had history relayed from some other author’s knowledge. Another difference is that Kleine could directly ask his sources the information that he needed, while I had to fish it out from several different sources.

#4) If I was to change my research according to Kleine, I would first start by gathering data because I used to inquire on what I would write about before knowing anything about the subject. My basic questions would be “what is this?” “how did this originate?” and “what did it do?” which are good questions, but I could dig deeper into the topic. More questions I could answer are “why did it happen?” “who did it affect?” and “what changes does this make?”