Jess Cohen: Blog Post #1

I didn’t realize until my senior year in college that all the time I spent reading and synthesizing secondary sources before writing a long course paper actually constituted research. Until then, I always associated the concept of “research” with the more empirical fields of study. In my lower level English classes, we were usually required to cite 3-5 sources, which I did more to follow the rubric and get a grade, and probably not deliberately enough to actually be considered research. But by the time I found myself in 4000 level seminar courses with 15 to 20 pages papers, I realized that the purpose of these papers was not just to see how well we could engage with a given novel or poem, but also how we understand the critical conversations surrounding those texts and how we enter ourselves into those conversations.

That being said, since the concept of literary research is still relatively new to me, my research style is haphazard at best. Like Dana, I prefer hard copies of essay collections to electronic journal articles. The problem is, I normally go to the library without really knowing what I’m looking for, and end up checking out 15 different books. I attribute this mostly to indecisiveness and impatience; I’m a chronic second-guesser, and I also always want to have a clearly defined argument before I’ve even articulated a research question. These are bad habits I hope this course will help me change. I’m already planning to heed Toheed’s advice this semester by “recording the research route” I take. This will help me keep my research both organized and focused.

For my Intro to Grad Studies assignment, I’ll most likely avoid wikipedia, because, as Kevin mentioned in his post, the information provided is not always reliable. Throughout both high school and college, my teachers openly repudiated the use of wikipedia as a citable source, so I think I’ve internalized their caution. True to form, I’m still trying to decide between a few different topics. To do so, I’ll use Towheed’s hierarchical approach to research whereby I’ll compare what’s available online at JSTOR, Project Muse, and other databases. From there, I’ll search Addison, and once I’ve perused my hard-copy sources, I’ll consult their bibliographies for breadth.