Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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Finally, you should consider which structure your readers might find most
helpful. Should you give readers a theoretical framework to help them make sense of the
subtopics and issues, or do you want to get them to appreciate the need for a theoretical
framework by asking them to grapple with subtopics and issues first? The hourglass or
linear-with-digressions structures work better if you start with a theoretical framework.
The wedge is better suited to letting a theoretical framework emerge from subtopics and
issues.
Where in your project do you integrate? In the shorter papers you’ve written so
far in college, you could safely set out the different perspectives one by one and leave
integration to the end. But, like so many other aspects of the senior project process, that
strategy doesn’t scale up well. As mentioned earlier, you cannot expect readers to hold a
large amount of information in their heads without knowing what they’re supposed to do
with it. So, somehow, you need to integrate as you go. Suppose you have five
perspectives on your topic. As soon as you present the second perspective, you can
integrate its insights with those from the first perspective. The resulting synthesis is
tentative and partial, but it creates common ground between those two perspectives and
highlights the connections between them. Next, present the third perspective and then
integrate its insights with the synthesis of the first two. The first synthesis may well be
modified, perhaps even reconsidered altogether, but the new synthesis is more
comprehensive and a closer approximation to the eventual synthesis, and it is based on
broader common ground. Readers have to remember only the synthesis from the end of
the preceding chapter, not the complete contents of two previous chapters, in order to
integrate their insights with those of the present chapter. By the time you present the last
perspective and integrate its insights with those of the other perspectives, it may have
only a modest impact on the overall synthesis, but it should be clear what contributions
each perspective made to the final synthesis. Synthesis was feasible because it did not
require readers to hold too much in their minds at once, and readers were less likely to
lose interest or concentration along the way.
Looking ahead, as you research and write individual chapters, you will get an
increasingly clear idea about the distinctive contribution of your project, the overall
sequence of steps in your argument, and your conclusion. By the time you hand in your
complete rough draft, those should all be pretty clear in your mind, though even then you
may revise them somewhat (your argument in particular) in light of the feedback you get
from your advisor and the workshop director. Through the process of researching and
writing the various chapters, you will probably discover that your topic keeps getting fine
tuned as well. So think of your outline as you do your annotated bibliography—as a
working draft that keeps getting revised as you continue to work on your project.
Writing the First Chapter
The assignment. Write one complete chapter in final form, and then write as
much of another chapter (or chapters) as needed to total thirty double-spaced pages
(Times 12-point font). The reason for writing a complete chapter in final form is to make
sure that you know what standards your advisor and workshop director expect you to
meet in a chapter—how polished your writing needs to be, how thoroughly researched
the chapter should be, how much depth and detail you need to go into on each topic and
issue, and how much and how explicitly to structure the chapter. Almost inevitably you’ll