16 Researching to Take a Stand

When you write to take a stand on an issue, you’ll need to inform your position with research. Sometimes students think of research as a thing they have to do because their professor tells them to. But how can research actually help your argumentative writing? Here are a few ideas.

How can research help you take a stand?

Research can help you…

• narrow your topic: When you start out researching a topic, it might feel overwhelming. But as you read some articles that break your topic into different subtopics and see the narrower takes others have written on your topic, you can get ideas for a more specific argument you could make.
• identify key terms: As you research, you can deepen your vocabulary on your topic by learning what specialized terms experts on this topic use.
• craft a more complex and evidence-based thesis: Finding out what studies, perspectives, and data exist on your topic can help you refine your own questions and write a more nuanced thesis that addresses the current evidence and perspectives on this issue.
• discover other points of view: You can credibly address counterarguments, or viewpoints that conflict with your own, if you read some writings by people with different perspectives on your topic.
• provide authority in your writing: While your personal experience, storytelling, and use of logic in your argument will helppersuade your readers, you can also add to the ethos of your piece by bringing in the expertise of other credible sources who have researched and written about your topic.
  

Research can be helpful even when you’re in the early stages of your writing project. You could call this “pre-search.” The following video (view time is 3:10) breaks down some of the benefits of starting your research before your topic is finalized, and it gives you some suggestions of library resources that can help you with “pre-search”:

Video 16.1. Pre-search: Exploring your topic by The SFCC Library: Bigfoot Research Team

Let’s apply these concepts with an example. Let’s say Magaly is a student who is interested in taking a stand on health data privacy. She wants to argue that people should be careful about the privacy of their health data. But where should she go from here? In the following exercise, read each research scenario and then identify how research helped Magaly in each case.