The acquisition of research skills is an important component of any undergraduate education. The research paper is a common form of writing that aims to help students develop those research skills. In the end, however, research is only relevant within a context. Too often, the research paper fails to help students see this point as it privileges "unoriginal writing by providing students not only with maps through the conventional routes of academic research, but also a standardized concept of how academic research writing should look and sound" (Davis and Shadle 418).

For Richard Larson, the standardization of the research paper results in a product that is too generic to capture the myriad ends for research writing and, as a result, is largely useless. "The so-called 'research paper,' as a generic, cross-disciplinary term, has no conceptual or substantive identity. If almost any paper is potentially a paper incorporating the fruits of research, the term 'research paper' has virtually no value as an identification of a kind of substance in a paper" (Larson 813).

If any written text that is the product of some research may fall under a heading of "research paper," then the term is too broad to have any real meaning. But the research paper does have some meaning. The current research paper is but a mere shadow of its progenitor, "the modernist research paper." According to Davis and Shadle, "At the advent of modern research writing, we find an egalitarian respect for the act of seeking, a desire to inscribe the passage into the unknown. Research writing was conceived in the modern era as a way of writing the making of knowledge" (Davis and Shadle 423).

While this view of research writing weds research to the process of discovery and the articulation of ideas, the research paper in practice has become less about discovery than collection and assembly. "The research paper came to be chiefly a vehicle for training—not in the creation of knowledge, but in the recording of existing knowledge" (Davis and Shadle 424).

The conception of the research paper described by Davis and Shadle, while not so vacuous as Larson argues, bears little relation to the "research essay" as conceived in this hypertext. The development of the "modernist research paper" makes it much more of a research report or summary of a research interest.

In a research report, students conduct research, collect, organize and present information. If research writing is conceived in this extremely limited (and limiting) fashion, hypertext might be an easily adoptable presentation medium since it is well suited to the task of collecting information.

In a research essay, however, the author organizes and presents information as part of an an effort to develop and support a project, position or argument. And it is this effort to articulate a position or "line" (Kolb) that is complicated by hypertext.

Copyright © Enculturation 2002

Navigate Enculturation:
Home | Contents 4:2 | Editors | Issues
About | Submissions | Subscribe | Copyright | Review | Links