I found the reading (chapters 3–6 from The Craft of Research in the section “Asking Questions, Finding Answers”) incredibly helpful as we face the daunting task of starting our thesis. The reading provided a process of how to tackle possible topics for research, determine critical questions, glean problems those topics, and how to distinguish, understand, find, and learn to work with problems.
For somebody like myself, who is new to this sort of research, this sort of best practices in approaching research provided strong guidance and direction for how to best proceed, think critically, and make the best use of the limited time.
I found it particularly helpful: when they broke down the approach down to answering the questions: “What will be lost if you don’t answer your question? How will not answering it keep us from understanding something else better than we do? Start by asking So what? at first of yourself:
1. what you are writing about—I am working on the topic of . . .
2. what you don’t know about it—because I want to find out . . .
3. why you want your reader to know and care about it—in order to help my reader understand better . . .”
The reading acknowledges that too many research often make the mistake of writing to answer a problem that only interests alone and encourages researchers to aim to go after problems that he/she thinks the community would like to see solved. Though I agree this is what makes a thesis compelling, I find this to be no easy task that involves a lot of critical thinking and practice.
The last two chapters dealt with sources. Distinguishing between the three (primary, secondary, and tertiary), it broke down how to locate them, evaluate them, find unexpected sources, and how to use people at primary sources. The reading gave guidance on what kind of evidence to look for, tips for recording complete bibliographical data, engaging sources actively, and how to use secondary sources to find a problem and plan an argument.
Most of this made common sense, but it helped to have this sort of check list approach. However, I am finding that it is not so easy for me to distinguish between Primary, secondary, and Tertiary sources and am hoping this will get easier as I do the work.