Researching and Making Claims
The text starts off with an example to make its point. Picture walking through a forest when you’re asked which is your favorite tree. After being asked, you suddenly notice the differences between the trees. “Researching” the trees made you realize you have an actual opinion on them and changed your view. Research in general has the power to change a person’s view on something. Research allows us to view and feel the world in greater depth. It’s also important to research for the sake of credibility. It contributes to the ethos of a person making a claim. It helps to reach your audience by making you and your work appear more credible and valid.
The most interesting sentence of the piece is “Learning more about a topic expands your capacity for emotion.” I find it interesting because I didn’t realize how true it is. Once you’re well-informed about something, you tend to form an opinion on it. The readings also later expand this sentence. Where you get your information also affects your feelings toward a topic and therefore affects your overall opinion.
The Research Process
Curiosity is a natural human trait. From a young age we ask questions and experiment to learn more about the world and ourselves. Researching is ingrained in our usual behavior and we may not even realize it. Something as simple as asking a friend whether or not you should see a certain movie is conducting research. Our best research questions come from when something we see as ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary. Forming a research question requires you to pause and take a look at the world around you. Research then goes on to give you surprising bits of information and probably cause you to form an entirely new opinion. Research isn’t so much a collection of facts as it is a type of exploration and learning.
“The best research questions often come from everyday life, when something ordinary, however briefly, becomes extraordinary” is this text’s most interesting sentence. Research comes from innate human curiosity. It’s how we learn and make our most useful discoveries in life.