Large Research Paper

Social scientists and humanists approach this task a bit differently:

The Social Scientific Approach

Social scientists always start the report with a review of published literature (information found in communication or like-minded scholarly books and journals, not Seventeen) that generally follows a deductive approach (general to specific).

Section I: The Literature Review

• Operationalze your variables (that means you need to very specifically define the elements of communication you are researching).
• Illustrate the significance of your study by pointing out problems with the previous research; you must indicate a gap (what is left to be done) in the research. The literature review is not some rambling list of who said what, but rather a concise summary of research followed by an explanation of how you are contributing to the conversation.
• Supply research questions (RQ) and possibly hypotheses (H) that indicate how you intend to fill the research gap.

Section II: The Methods Section
The methods section, usually the second section, describes data selection sources, settings, strategies, and/or analytical procedures, and your writing should be very precise. For instance, a research report might have three sub-sections under Methods including participants (whom did you study?), procedure (exactly how did you go about the study?), and instruments (what did you ask in your survey?).

Section III: The Findings
A third section, the Findings, shows the numerical results from a statistical analysis.

Section IV: Discussion of Implications
Finally, a discussion of implications gives you space to argue what your statistical results might actually mean. You go back to tell the answer to your research question or to see if you were right about your hypothesis; you thus illustrate how your findings might confirm ideas about communication or change them. You often end with illustrating the limitations to your study.
It is ultimately important that you personify objectivity in the report. You do this through your prose:

• Write in third person.
• Consider using passive voice most of the time (to gain detachment).
• Use the American Psychological Association style manual (see APA guidelines). APA privileges scientific ways of writing and knowing.

The Humanistic Approach

Section I: The Literature Review
Humanists also start with a literature review. The review follows generally the same path as the one social scientists use (see above), but humanists are more concerned with indicating a particular scholarly conversation going on regarding a theoretical approach, a context, or a specific text (or all of the above).

• The literature review is always argumentative and leads to an explicit gap statement.
• While humanists don’t supply RQs or Hs (those are social scientific norms), they almost always include a research question, purpose statement, and/or thesis, and a statement of justification (why is this study important?).

Section II: Methods
The methods section is quite a bit different from that of the social scientist, described above.

• You will employ a particular theoretical approach or a well-established method of rhetorical criticism in your analysis (or perhaps take particular steps in an ethnography), and you detail that approach in this section.
• You should also justify your critical approach (why this critical theory or why this form of rhetorical criticism?)

Section III: Analysis
The bulk of your essay is the analysis in which you simply apply the critical framework or method to the text (or artifact or case study) and argue for your interpretation and/or evaluation of the text in light of that application (your understanding of how the text is functioning persuasively, for instance).

• Make good, persuasive arguments about the text.
• Use evidence from the text as support.
• Use theory to help explain or elaborate on your particular claims.
  
  Section IV: Implications
  The final section, often called the Implications (but you have options), illustrates what possible ways you have contributed to the understanding of the text, the culture or context, and communication/rhetorical theory.
  
  As with research reports, humanists tie points back to the literature review revealing to the reader how the writer filled the gap.
  
  It is ultimately important to personify the assumptions of humanistic inquiry in your writing:
  
  
• Write in first person (to display ownership).
• Maintain the active voice (to suggest engagement).
• Use the Modern Language Association style (see MLA guidelines. )
• If you’re a very skilled writer you might even experiment with your prose. Excellent writers can use language as rhetorical enactment. Rhetorical enactment in this context means that your writing style becomes implicit evidence for the arguments you are making, or else the writing itself (apart from content) encompasses or supports your thesis. But this is very hard to do, so do not try it unless you consider yourself quite skilled.