As we work through the 5-step writing process, we’re on the first step: planning.
Planning has three (or so) components:
- Generating
- Researching
- Outlining
Today we’re on research.
Don’t panic! Research just means finding out what you don’t know. You do research all the time. For example, you:
- Call Accounting to find out how much you spent on advocacy events last year
- Tap your database for trends in the number of people served
- Visit a program similar to yours to see how it handles child safety
- Check the date of Passover
When you do research for an informal piece like an email or project update memo, you know up front what information you need and what you’re going to do with it.
If you’re writing a journal article, proposal, or report that requires formal research, you still should know, before you start looking, what you need and what you’ll do with it.
That’s why generating comes before researching.
When we read other people’s materials – that is, when we do what we learned in school to call “research” – those other materials can easily take over.
To make sure that you are using your research rather than letting your research use you, generate your own ideas first.
True, sometimes your research changes your mind or suggests that you need to spend more or less space arguing a point, depending on how well accepted it is in the field. You might temporarily go back to generating.
That’s OK! The whole process is recursive. There’s a reason to do the steps in order, but sometimes you need to revisit a step. That’s a feature of the process, not a bug.
When you’ve got your ideas and your sources in order, you’re ready to impose structure. Next up: outlining.