41 Research Starts With Answers

Alison C. Witte’s essay from Bad Ideas About Writing, “Research Starts With Answers,” suggests that research actually starts with questions. Sometimes we have a hypothesis, or we have some assumptions that we need to test with our research, but effective research can often surprise us and make us rethink our initial understandings.

Read Alison C. Witte’s “Research Starts With Answers.” 

Listen to Kyle Stedman’s audio-version of this text. 

Keywords from this chapter in Bad Ideas about Writing

argument, claim-based writing, classical argument, data-driven writing, research paper, research writing, rhetoric

Author Bio from Bad Ideas about Writing

Alison Witte is an associate professor of humanities and communication at Trine University in Angola, Indiana. She has been teaching research writing to college students for 10 years. She regularly teaches courses in research writing, research methods, technical writing, and advanced composition, and has co-developed curriculum for teaching research writing to international graduate students. She also chairs her university’s Institutional Review Board, which reviews and approves all campus research projects with human participants. Her research interests include student research practices, digital pedagogy, digital pedagogy preparation, and non-classroom writing. Her twitter handle is @acwitte82.