Writing a Research Paper

Okay, so now that you have finished writing your literature review and are starting to analyze your primary sources, let's talk about about how to bring it all together into a research paper for your Communities of Practice and their Genres paper this semester:

In this paper, you will ultimately be brining together your primary research to make a claim about how genres work in communities of practice. Analysis can be hard, so I suggest you think back to the Genre Analysis Worksheet and Research Question. Those are good places to remind yourself what primary research is for this paper.

Remember, we are practicing a mini-IMRaD to prepare you for a more sophisticated version of this genre in ENC 1102. Below, I will first outline our mini-IMRaD requirements and then give you the more elaborate version.

IMRAD Video

For a quick overview of the IMRAD format, check out this short video.

IMRD: The Parts of a Research Paper

Outline for the Research Paper: Mini IMRaD

Because this is a smaller, practice research project, we'll be using IMRaD with some specific guidelines for our write-up. The following outline can be used to help you understand what content you should include in each section. The organization within each section though is up to you.

Introduction

Provide background information on the course concepts relevant to your paper

Imagine your audience isn’t in this class, how would you explain community of practice and genre? What textual support will you need to do this?

Discuss your chosen community as a community of practice

Again imagine your audience has no prior understanding of your community. Provide specific information about their values, practices, genres, and ways of being.

Introduce your research question

Include a brief discussion of what you wanted to learn by doing this research and how this would help us better understand how communities of practice function

Methods

Discuss what genres you collected, how you collected them, and why you made those choices

Results

Summarize each piece of primary data

Summarize the genre(s) collected for your audience
Analyze the genre(s) you collected using the Rhetorical Genre Analysis worksheet as a guideline

Discussion

Include a 1 to 2-sentence claim that states the answer to your research question

This answer is your “claim”

Support claim with evidence from your primary data and textual support from the course articles:

How is this claim supported by the genre(s) you collected?
Why is the argument important in this community of practice?

Conclusion

Summarize your main points
Discuss what you learned about communities of practice from your research study.

Works Cited/References

Cite credible secondary source about your community of practice and any course articles you referenced