Essay #4: Research/Synthesis

The writing assignment:

For this paper you will select and narrow a topic, find research material, and write a six-page research paper with appropriate MLA documentation of your outside resources.

Why “synthesis”?

You are probably familiar with a typical school “report”—you probably had to write several. You got an assigned topic (for example, Volcanos). You opened up Wikipedia, found the article on “Volcanos,” and submitted a summary of the article. If you were asked for more than one source, you did a Google search, found an article or two, and attached a summary of those to the end of the Wikipedia summary.

That worked pretty well for the fifth or sixth grade, but by the tenth grade, that strategy was a bit below you. And now we are in college.

The idea of a synthesis paper is to ask a smart question and use evidence from several sources to put an answer together—perhaps an answer that nobody has really found before. Question examples:

• What would happen if Ashland University decided that all college-owned vehicles must be electrics?
• Does the current use of Artificial Intelligence damage the environment?
• What are the benefits, if any, of “third place” venues such as locally owned coffee shops? And are there already third places where people actually meet?
• There is a small but growing movement to return to analog communication—typewriters, hand-written letters and the like. How big is it and what are its claimed benefits?
• How do local arts organizations (Bucyrus Little Theater and Mid-Ohio Civic Opera are examples) affect their towns?

Hints for Success

A successful synthesis paper has several characteristics.

• It limits its topic. You only have six pages to work with, so you cannot hope to deal with everything related to education or with all racial or ethnic strife everywhere in the USA.
  • You will notice that in my examples above, I went quite small. I did not ask about changing all Ohio drivers over to electric cars—a totally impossible idea. I went for a little fleet of perhaps two dozen vehicles.
• It has a tight focus on its limited topic: It does not go wandering off to other topics the writer thought of in passing.
• It tells the truth. Wild guesses, conspiracy theories, and discussion of the writer’s favorite unsupported prejudices do not count.
• It makes a point and presents an argument that the point is valid. It is more than a collection of quotations. Just stringing a lot of quotes together does not make a point, even if you cite them and avoid plagiarism. You need to do the work of interpreting and synthesizing. Most of the writing should be yours.
• It depends on outside evidence to support its point. You are not an expert in any of these fields, but you can write something worthwhile by using evidence from other experts. A paper that depends on the writer’s feelings and guesses is worthless.
  • One benefit of my little local topics above is that you have some hope of actually talking to someone who knows about the topic. You can probably chase down the owner of the Relax coffee house or whoever is in charge of Ashland University vehicles.

Danger Points

A six-page research paper may seem like an enormous project (though you will be asked for much longer papers in future courses), so you might be tempted by some strategies which will sabotage you. Here are a few to avoid:

• The “Everything About Everything” paper You may think that a big, loose topic will make a long, thoughtful paper, but it won’t. At best, it will give you a generalized paper that reads like a middle‑school report. A topic such as “Everything there is to know about youth smoking in the United States” is what I am talking about. (To really nail that one, you would need two or three thousand pages.) You would have more success with “How Juul advertising targeted young teenagers and seduced them into nicotine addiction.” Go narrow and tight.
• Refusing to Take a Side After browsing through a dozen resources, you should have an opinion about your topic. A thesis such as “Some say e‑cigarettes are bad but others say they are not” sounds like an on‑ramp to a very boring, useless paper. Even worse would be “Vaping is neither good nor bad for teenagers.” Why bother to write that? Why bother to read it? Besides, remember that one of the grading criteria for your paper is that its thesis “Makes an arguable claim.” The “some say one thing and some say another” thesis and the “there is no truth” thesis do not fulfill this requirement.
  • You may have been taught that you must give equal time to both sides of any argument and that your own opinion must never appear in a paper. It is time to forget those teachings. Yes, you must respect those who take the other side and deal with their objections, but sooner or later, you have to take a stand.
• Misusing Quotations A research paper is more than an exercise in quotation insertion. Here are some ways students waste their research material:
  • Using quotes as filler Whether you like to throw in a quote at the top of the paragraph as a sort of slogan or simply drop it in passing without any comment, filler quotes do not help your paper. They send the message that “I am worried about my page count, so here are a few more words to fill up space.”
  • Using quotes to relieve you of the task of writing When you use a quotation to do ordinary exposition, you send the message that you don’t trust your own writing (or you are lazy). You are not interested in doing any thinking or writing.
  • Mosaic plagiarism I always have one or two students who skate all over the Internet, picking up a couple of lines here and a paragraph there, gluing them together into a paper, and claiming that they did the writing. This kind of cheating is surprisingly easy to detect and nearly as much work as being honest. Don’t do it. If you are lucky, I will only give you a zero for the paper.
• Dodgy Sources Some, such as Wikipedia, are merely shallow. They are OK for giving you an overview of the topic, but they are not really scholarly— we’re looking for a gourmet dinner, and Wikipedia is a frozen microwaveable entree. Others, for example Fox News, Breitbart, and Newsmax, are just plain wrong. If you’re lucky, you will only get misleading errors from these; often, though, you will get statements that are flat-out lies. In terms of my dinner metaphor, these are cyanide. This is a difficult field for a college freshman to navigate; your instructor and librarians can help you find reliable sources.

Artificial Intelligence

The student who is using AI to generate a paper is always doing it intentionally—there is no possibility of it being an accident. This assignment pulls in a lot of AI papers, and I’m pretty likely to figure them out: the loose “thesis” which says “Let us look at a bunch of stuff,” the overblown language, the total lack of any specific evidence, the fabricated quotations and citations. No, I usually cannot say unequivocally that a paper is AI, so I usually grade a paper on its merits, but you should remember:

1. The typical AI paper which has no problems such as fabrication is usually worth a C minus at best. These papers usually have perfect grammar, but have problems with an indistinct thesis statement and pretentious language.
2. Major fabrication (invented quotations, misstatement of facts, and false citations) counts as a violation of the Academic Integrity Policy and will earn the paper a zero with no opportunity for revision plus a referral to the Registrar.

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The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 12/26/24 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.