The writing, “Introduction to Researching and Making Claims”, Seth Graves points out that when we are exposed to new information, it can change us and expand our capacity of emotion. He describes this with the scenario where you didn’t know any of the trees in a big park, but the guide tells you about them and their names. Instead of recognizing a tree as just a tree, you would recognize them by name instead. He writes that we research because we need credibility to distinguish our claim as real in a society where fake news is found everywhere. The sense of credibility is also able to change a person’s emotion and gives it a valid reason to be believed. I found this to be the most interesting sentence in this piece because credibility is essential now and is hard to prove a point without any. When we are writing any paper, we need to make sure we get our facts checked and make sure they are credible if we want to convince our audience.
The writing, “The Research Process”, tells us why we conduct research. It starts out by telling the common scenario of a child bombarding an adult with “Why?” after every question being answered. The writers of this piece claim that we do this because we want to gain pleasure from learning something new. When we answer our everyday questions, we are conducting research and with that information, we can act accordingly if the scenario calls for it. A sentence that interested me in this piece is, “An inductive approach to forming a research question means by and large pausing briefly and looking at the world around us.” I find this interesting because when you are researching a topic, you are often focused on your bias opinion of the subject, but if we do that, we cannot get a good understanding why we think that way. In other words, we need to look at a topic differently and even explore the reasons why someone may be against our opinions in order to see the whole picture. Like politicians today, they only focus on their own agenda, and any other agenda that opposes theirs is seen as threatening and will be no room for compromise. To avoid that, we need to see the research question more broadly.