“Introduction to Research and Making Claims” summary and response:
Seth Graves talks about the importance of research and the effects it can have on us. He essentially states that the foundation for how good someone’s research is, is based on one’s credibility. He references a Stanford Universities study about how uninformed the average student is on what sources are actually credible. Graves states that “credibility contributes to the ethos of the person making a claim,” hence how understanding credibility in research is a key component in believing a claim to begin with. I personally think the most interesting sentence in this introduction is how “Learning more about a topic expands your capacity for emotion.” I really like this because it brings up the idea of how the more informed you are on a certain topic, the more invested you become in said topic. This sentence ties most of this introduction together as it explains why we would want credible research in the first place.
“The Research Process” summary and response:
Like the title implies this piece is written to inform the reader about the process of conducting research for a paper. The authors define research as the “process of wanting to know more.” They use a person’s interested in finding out why their friend likes a certain movie as an example of conducting research. The authors call this process of wanting to learn more as the process of inquiry. They claim that by asking questions about a topic the reader is trying to find the exigence in the first place. Not only do the authors want to inform it’s audience about the research process but they also want their audience to see that research “isn’t so much a collection of facts the prove your case but rather a type of exploration.” I agree with that statement to an extent. In a way, just by simply exploring a topic, the reader has already conducted some form of research.
Research-Based Argument:
- Genetic Cloning
- The Pharmaceutical Industry
- Immigration in the United States