Introduction

Genre

Introduction

What is a research paper?

Types of research papers

Audience

Plagiarism

Topic

Scope

Thesis or Question

Research

Outline

First Draft

Revisions

Proofreads

Additional Resources

Writing a Research Paper

Genre

Audience

The first question you might have is "Huh? What audience?" This is the most common mistake first-year college writers make: thinking they're writing for a professor and that's it. Or at the other extreme, and equally ineffective, envisioning the audience as "society in general," "everyone with a college education," or "any scholar or academic." The former mistake is too narrow and the latter too broad to give your paper any focus.

Here's an analogy illustrating the importance of audience from Dr. Steven Hale's article Choosing and Writing for an Audience. When you prepare an oral presentation, isn't one of the implicit requirements of the assignment to know who your audience will be so that you can adjust your style accordingly? Nothing changes when you write an essay...well, except that it's harder to remember to apply the same procedure. After all, it's rather hard to picture an "audience" reading your paper the same way a group would be physically listening to you speak.

As Hale, professor of Humanities at DeKalb College, describes it, the audience is divided into the real and the intended. Real or actual readers might be a peer, a tutor from an OWL, and of course your teacher. But though you hand it in to your prof and it comes back to you, a research paper does not work like a one-to-one "Dear Mrs. Smith" private correspondence. Remembering a teacher's preferences is important, but it isn't--to borrow a Star Trek term--your Prime Directive. Hale reminds us that it's crucial to write with the intended audience in mind.

But who exactly is that? Well, Richard Creese, Karen Moloney, Randal Woodland from the Campus Writing Center at the University of Michigan at Dearborn articulate it to a tee:

...imagine your instructor as representing a larger academic audience. That audience often expects something like what appears in academic journals that share original research with members of the community. Writing should make a new contribution to the knowledge of a given field. Therefore, you need to appear serious about the subject matter. You take on a role as an entering member of the academic community... You are establishing a relationship between yourself and a larger audience, not simply between you and your instructor."

So think of yourself as carving out a little niche in an ongoing scholarly debate, of adding another voice to the chorus of academics who already have something to say about the topic you're writing about. A good idea might be to narrow your audience down to your course (that includes professor, classmates, T.A.s, future profs) and the research community in your field be it English, Biology, or Sociology.

Why is it important to write with a more specific audience in mind? Hale urges that your essay will have more purpose with this clearer focus, will more directly engage your readers in your argument, and will make choices regarding tone, diction, and even sentence structure infinitely easier to make come drafting time.