Chapter 3 of The Bedford Researcher: Summary and Discussion

Chapter three of The Bedford Researcher focuses on developing a research question and proposal. Now that we’ve explored a writing topic and gathered sources, it’s important to reflect on what we have learned and identify what has changed. It’s likely that the level of initial understanding of the issue has changed and crafting research questions to reflect those changes will be necessary. Step two on page 42 has a great exercise that allows a writer to generate more research questions. What will the focus of the paper be? What assumptions do people have about the issue? Working through the exercise questions on the table on page 43 helps the writer gain a better understanding of what they’ll want to accomplish. The second half of the chapter focuses on how to write a proposal. There are six main components to a proposal, including: title page, introduction to the topic, review of literature, information collection methodology, timeline, and a working bibliography.

We reviewed a portion of the first section of this chapter two weeks ago in lecture, which was helpful in allowing me to develop different ways of asking my research question. I am more interested in how to write a good proposal so the second half of the chapter was more helpful to me. Pages 54-57 include a sample research proposal for reference. I am a little concerned that the review of literature section will be very long for my proposal, given that there is a lot of information to cover. I imagine an annotated bibliography will help me identify which sections of certain articles I ought to review and discuss.