Transcript Lesson 12 Essentials Video: Researching

CARA: If I could give someone advise, one piece of advice about both college writing and college, I would say to get your reading done first because in the writing process, if you get all your reading done first, you will have such a strong grasp on your subject matter—and most likely, you'll have a strong opinion on your subject matter—that writing down what you have to say will feel natural because you're just expressing what you know and trying to pass that knowledge to other people.

HANNAH: My least favorite part is research. It is my least favorite part. It's tedious. It's long. It's time-consuming. But it's the most important part.

EMILY: The most important stage that I need help in my writing is in the beginning, in the "research stage" is what I like to call it. I'm a very indecisive person. I can never narrow down a topic. Sometimes, I'll even start writing a paper on one topic and completely change it after going through hours of research.

CHASE: I think research is actually part of every assignment at some level.

DEONTA: There have been a couple of papers where I found myself having to go back and do more research. So there was one paper—I forget what I was talking about.

But I was writing, and I did some research. And as I was writing and putting the text that I was supposed to be writing about in conversation with the research that I found, a new topic came to mind. So I had to go back and do some more research.

HUSSAIN: I would say there's a stage before I start writing anything. And then there's a stage after I'm done writing everything. I look at the research again.

DAN: So research should be the first step of everything for me, and it also should be the thing that I am consistently going back to as I'm producing.

HANNAH: Once I chose what topic I was going to write about, I decided to do research next. And when I do research, I also write an outline at the same time of what I want to write about. I write down quotes that I feel are important. I write down things that may have popped up into my mind that I want to say in the paper as I'm doing research. So I write that all down on an outline.

And then once my research is done, I go and write my works cited page next before I do any writing because this allows me to go OK, this is the quote I wanted to use, this is where it came from, and this is how I want to integrate it into my paper. So after I've done all that, I go and write.