Get a Q, Man: Finding a Research Question

I’m not new to writing, and I’m certainly not new to hating it. I learned from an early age to hate assignments that required me to put pencil to paper, though in retrospect I realize that I loved using pencils and paper: what I hated was the stupid “copy this down” assignments that qualified as learning in my elementary school. I hated the focus on handwriting, and I hated the way that teachers made a difficult and cantankerous language seem like something we should all already know. In later years, I hated the way that grammar instruction was used as a bludgeon for reminding students of what they didn’t know, as a way to say “I’m in the aristocracy because I can correctly identify parts of speech.” When I learned to type in the seventh grade (manual typewriters, desks in a row, copying out inane texts) I found that writing could be fun because typing was a challenge. I never had good handwriting, but I learned to type quickly and realized that typing was not about cramped hands and boredom and instead focused on quickly getting words onto the page. I loved typing.

But I still didn’t enjoy writing until we began writing essays about books in high school. My English teacher for both my freshman and junior years was a wonderful woman who supplemented her terrible teaching salary by writing trashy romance novels. She could write, and write to a deadline, and that gave her a lot of mental freedom to not worry about silly things like grammar instruction and note cards, and instead focus on writing. I remember writing an essay about Stoker’s Dracula that was particularly fun. I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed it. What I realize now is that I enjoyed writing for a purpose, and discussing the role of technology in an industrial age, as Stoker saw it, in fighting a spiritual being was about as practical as I would be for a number of years. But I could see how words fit into ideas, and how ideas fit into a tool, a very special tool called an argument, and an argument could—I could see this already in high school—change people. Is there a greater magic?

In college, I had difficult writing what I thought were really good research papers. Something that involved my own opinion was easy enough—just sit down, hammer down a few lines and you’re done. But coming up with something to look into, to research, to learn about and then formulate an opinion was as hard as hard gets. I’m interested in everything! How am I supposed to pick and choose when medieval heraldry, Greek columns (and the associated philosophies of beauty and ratios), and Wittgenstein all scream for my attention? Like Rands in Repose, I cherish the “content firehose,” the constant input of all kinds of data, scooping up bits of information like gold and devouring it like manna from heaven. And so I realize now that my problem with writing isn’t motivational, isn’t technological (putting pen or whatever to paper, or banging away on the keyboard), isn’t philosophical; instead, my problems with writing have to do with focus. I ain’t got focus. Everything is interesting to me in some way, and I have trouble hanging on to a writing project for longer than it takes to make a pithy observation. I click madly through Wikipedia like the Internet is about to die and I’ll be the one required to know who the Red Baron’s little brother was (Lothar) and that the Duesenberg brothers went on to put their automotive design features into cars for Auburn, or that General Electric makes some of the most terrifying guns in existence (electrically-powered Gatling guns used to destroy infantry machinery and personnel).

Now that I’m working on a dissertation, this otherwise innocuous problem (who can be faulted for curiosity? other than cats, that is) is the insurmountable peak, the immovable object, the moving target that is myself, my problem, and my dissertation. It is destructive to everything valuable in a dissertation, a scholarly study intended to launch a scholarly career of focused, disciplined inquiry. I’ve always known that discipline is one of my gifts. I’ve spent my adult life forging ahead when others quit, regulating food and drink, quitting smoking (I’m great at that one: I’ve done it dozens of times), getting papers graded and back on time, biking and walking rather than driving, reading and studying rather than watching television. But any of those things can be done by marshalling my body, and I find that there are times when I cannot marshal my mind.

The research question: was there ever a taller, more forbidding Everest? Is there a Tenzing to my Hillary, or am I not Hillary at all, but instead some weekend climber who believes that weekly, daily, hourly hard work can be forsaken for the purchased privilege of being carried to the top, snapping a quick pic on the cell phone and jetting back home to yodel about my accomplishments on Flickr and a commercial blog?

How does one get to the Research Question? I’m willing to bet that there are loads of heuristics, rubrics, and Venn diagrams from self-help academic guidebooks written by successful scholars who know, just KNOW, that their method will work for anyone. Like weight-loss and exercise machine infomercials, if I just had the faith in their product that they do then I’d shuffle off this mortal dissertation with aplomb and—most tempting of all—speed. Because speed is what I want now, a done dissertation and a good job lined up for the fall, the time when all us good academics spawn our way to new institutions and the “baths of all the western stars.”

I don’t think someone else’s method would work for me in finding a research question any more than someone else’s exercise routine would satisfy me. There might be the initial interest, the initial exercise that is different and somehow appealing, but in the end I’d go back to making my own routine, based on my own eccentricities, my own exercise goals, and my own resources. My own approach, in other words, has always been my favorite.

Sometimes, when the moon is just right, I tell my students that writing is like sculpting with clay: you pile enough material together, take some out, shape it around, and eventually you build up enough good material in the right proportions in order to have something that works, something recognizable to someone else as pretty, or useful, or valuable. Then I turn things around and say that writing is also like sculpting with marble. You begin with a huge glob of immutable stone, something heavy and hard to work with, and you make small cuts, chips really, and keep taking away and taking away until you’ve gotten the thing you wanted, the shape of your ideas. It’s this contradictory metaphor, of adding and subtracting, that daunts me in the search for my research question. I can add easily—that’s my talent, in fact, finding things that someone else didn’t know were there and adding them to the pile, seeing relationships between the stone monolith in front of you and the chips on the floor, some from other’s work, that still bear a resemblance to the mother stone which birthed them. But taking away? That’s hard. I’m a terrible pretender, and I cannot pretend that all the chips on the floor, and all the sculptures in the garden, aren’t all of a piece, the same piece, the same pursuit that drew us all to the quarry.

So now I’m looking at 20 some-odd pages of pre-proposal, though it’s really just a preamble, and I see things about service courses, textbooks, the value of technical communication, stakeholders, research methods, program review, timelines, and (of course) technology, and I don’t see the dots. I can’t see the dots. They’re there, apparently others can see them, but I can’t find them consistently, and if I can’t find them how am I supposed to connect those dots? For me, each dot is a galaxy, a waiting storehouse of content and intrigue, and the lines between them are just the most obvious state highways going from one place to another—there’s one right there, it’s out in the open and it’s not interesting, but what I really need is some altitude, some distance, so that I can see the outlines and say, “Ahhhhh, this is a picture of. . .” Something. Some arrangement of pixels that means something, that can be expressed in a sentence, but not just any sentence, a particular rhetorical construction that begs the existence of another rhetorical construction—a question. I’m good at the “quest,” part—I can look and learn and look and learn, but it’s the formulation of what I’m looking for that has me in a bind, so tightly wound up that I cannot see the ropes, only know that they’re preventing me seeing what’s really there, where the knot is, where the skein is tied, or even to recognize the skein at all. The yarn of my studies is too far into my skin; I can’t see it for the pain.

But there’s a way to do it, I just know there is and if I keep looking, scanning, browsing, I’ll find it. But the scanning and browsing has to be within me, not without; essential rather than accidental. What am I looking for, and how do I compile what I already know into that question?

Can program review research methods be modified to inform TC service courses fast enough to keep up with changes in workplace writing?

I don’t know. It sounds wrong, feels wrong, in my head when I read it. There’s not enough there, not enough material, stone, chips, and there’s also too much there, too many nouns, and too many loose ends (what does “fast enough” mean?).

How about –

Can a program review method be developed that accounts for the potential for rapid change in workplace writing, and can that method be applied to TC service courses?

For my money, that’s two questions, not one, but they are closely related and maybe that counts for something. More stone, less chips, though, so that’s good. But, as Fred Kemp has pointed out, I should avoid a yes/no question.

My most current version of this question is below:


What is the most effective research method for practical, responsive curricular change within TC service courses in order to keep pace with changing workplace writing genres and writing tools?

Note to my family

Howdy! I wanted you to see some pictures of where I'm staying as well as pictures of my friends.

This first picture is of Fred Kemp and Ritu Raju. Fred is my dissertation chair, which means he's my teacher. Ritu is from India, and she's one of my classmates.
This is my room. Can you find my computer? Can you find my hat?

This is one of our classrooms. You can see Fred, my teacher, at the front of the classroom leading the discussion. Can you find my hat?

This is my very good friend, Kendall. She has two daughters.

I want you all to know that I'm working hard and that I love you very, very much. I miss you and love you! I'll be home in 12 days.