POLITICAL SCIENCE: Academic Inquiry

• Research doesn't happen in a straight line from start (assignment prompt) to finish (polished paper/presentation).
• Research includes finding background information to help you shape your ideas.
• Research incorporates analyses from journalists and scholars, whose ideas help you reframe and revise your research questions.
• Research includes making evaluative decisions about which and whose perspectives to incorporate into your own scholarship.

Learn more about narrowing a topic and developing a research question.

What could a writer/presenter/performer do with this source?

More on "How to Use Sources Effectively."

Based on Bizup, J. (2008). BEAM: A rhetorical vocabulary for teaching research-based writing. Rhetoric Review 27.1, 72-86.