How to Correctly Conduct Research and Write / Edit Essays

When it comes to learning how to properly conduct academic research and write essays, there is no substitute for hands-on experience. While many universities attempt to teach students research and writing skills through pedantic, minutely detailed writing prompts and instructions, I would argue that the best way improve one's writing skills is exposure to high-quality writing and ample opportunities to practice. This practice can come in many forms. Rather than writing one, overly long 15-page paper per semester, students should be encouraged to write short, expository essays that they then refine and re-draft. Reducing writing to a rote task, dominated by arcane rules and conventions, transforms the research and writing experience into an intolerable bore. What could be enjoyable instead becomes just another task on a never-finished 'to do' list.

If teaching writing is best achieved through the use of shorter expository writing assignments and structured feedback, teaching research skills could be approached the same way. In this regard, a short and structured tutorial (or series of tutorials) would be useful, combined with small, discrete assignments that teach students the principles of academic research. Too often students are told to conduct research but lack the critical thinking skills or frame of reference to be able to distinguish between high-quality primary and secondary sources and low-quality opinion pieces.

One particular element of academic writing or editing that is particularly challenging for students is citing and formatting academic references. This difficulty is linked to the fact that many students do not understand the concepts and rationale behind proper formatting. To students raised with all of the world's knowledge at their fingertips, the academic obsession with proper attribution and formatting styles seems archaic. For students today, the distinctions between Chicago, APA and MLA are meaningless, and citations are more likely to be generated through a website or citation reference tool than by the student themselves. The inordinate focus on citation style is driven by factors beyond plagiarism. For many professors, an emphasis on following "proper" citation styles provides them with an easy metric to deduct points from an assignment. Rather than having to write comments on clarity, style or grammar in general, professors are able to robotically deduct points for flaws in citation style, even when they frequently make the same errors themselves.

Overall, teaching students academic-level research, editing, revising, rewriting, and writing skills should be done through experiential hands-on learning, divided into manageable segments and, most importantly, related to their real-life experiences and concerns. Too often academia feels like a rote exercise, where students in practical and applied programs forced to product conventional academic writing following robotic formatting conventions. This style of teaching is geared to benefit the professors-in that it reduces their workloads-rather than the students. A genuine interest in teaching students how to research and write would take advantage of all of the things educational researchers have learned about differentiated learning styles, aptitudes and interests, rather than trying to prescriptively shape student outcomes using outdated pedagogues and techniques. A revised approach to research and writing education would then not only be beneficial to students, but to the academic community more broadly. Revalorizing the idea that education has intrinsic value and that students learn in different ways would help to counteract academia's tendencies toward homogenization and rote instruction.

Reference: RobotRewrite.com - human editors and writers help students revise, rewrite, edit, or paraphrase academic papers "written" by AI robots.