Interdisciplinary Research Manual - Units.muohio.edu

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you came to write your project, why the topic or problem is important to you, how the
project fits into your life. It’s a personal statement. The introduction, in contrast, is about
the subject matter of the project—the topic, issues, positions, and perspectives—not
about you. Its focus is intellectual and scholarly, not personal. The preface can be
conversational in tone and should be written in the first person singular, while the
introduction should have a formal tone.
It’s appropriate anywhere in your project (including the introduction) to step back
from your line of argument to interject an observation in the first person singular,
especially to disclose a personal bias that the reader needs to know to make a fully
informed evaluation of what you are saying. (If you do, be sure to make it clear that you
have temporarily changed your rhetorical stance.) It’s also appropriate to interject
personal examples (also written in the first person singular), though you should be clear
that the strengths of personal examples are empathy and immediacy; they provide little in
the way of evidence in support of your argument. One could even make a case for using
the first person singular throughout an interdisciplinary project in order to draw the
reader into the interdisciplinary reasoning process and to highlight the constructivist
nature of the interdisciplinary approach. One rhetorical strategy that distinguishes
interdisciplinary writing is the use of meta-discussion, where you step back from what is
being said to examine the process by which the topic has been studied or the terms in
which it is normally presented within that perspective. In short, you will have to spend
some time talking about the disciplines and how they function, about not only what it is
they have to say but why they say it.
After you write a second chapter and you see its implications for the first chapter
you wrote, should you go back and rewrite that chapter or should you wait until the entire
rough draft is completed to revise? While it may appeal to your desire for neatness to
rewrite as you go, it’s less efficient than rewriting the entire project all at once. Every
chapter will have implications when you’ve finished writing it for all the previously
written chapters. Indeed, even if you’ve done some integration as you go, when you pull
the project all together in the conclusion you are likely to realize for the first time exactly
how the other chapters fit together and thus how they need to be rewritten. You can’t
rewrite any one chapter for sure until you understand exactly how it relates to all the
other chapters and what it contributes to the whole, and you won’t know either one until
you’ve completed the rough draft. Then you may realize that a section may need to be
switched to another chapter, that material you thought you wouldn’t use must be added,
or material that seemed central now becomes more peripheral and needs to be shifted to a
less prominent location within the chapter or removed altogether. The one exception is
cleaning up the mechanics of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. When you get
feedback on mechanics that applies to earlier chapters as well, it’s a good idea to make
that correction in all the chapters you’ve written, simply because you’re more likely to
develop the habit of doing it correctly if you practice it a bunch of times.
What do you do when you’re studying a public policy problem in a less developed
country (e.g., public health; economic, social, or political development; land use or
environmental policies) and the relevant theoretical literature and the best practice
techniques all come out of former colonial powers? You don’t want to be a neocolonialist
or engage in cultural hegemony by looking, for example, at an African
problem through an American lens and arguing that Ghana should be more like the