Research Quest

The last video on the previous page highlights two ways of organizing your essay:

1. Cause & effect
2. Problem & solution ("Course of action" is the phrase it uses)

There are, however, other ways of organizing your essay.  You will probably discuss other schemes in class, but below is a "cheat sheet" from the University of Washington:

Additionally, knowing the distinction between causation and correlation is extremely important in college and professional-level writing!  Many people, both in and out of school, do not seem to adequately understand this difference and claim that X causes Y when research really only supports the idea that there is a correlation between the two.  

A correlation says that when we observe X we also observe Y, but the evidence is not strong enough to say that Y could only have happed because of X.  The strength of the relationship between the two may not be strong enough to say X causes Y to happen.  Unfortunately, Politicians, advertisers, and journalists, and other public figures frequently confuse cause and correlation.  Below is a link to a video that helps illustrate the difference between the two concepts, lasting 5:27.

The next video will introduce you to several tools you have access to that can help you begin to break down general topics into smaller, more manageable subtopics which lend themselves to good research questions.  The video lasts 6:27.

This next video takes marijuana legalization as a topic and applies the thinking in the previous videos to demonstrate how we can break down a topic into a workable research topic, into a manageable chunk.  The video lasts 2:21.