Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Tip of the iceberg

In chapter 5 the book discusses research, how to develop research and how it varies in writing. This chapter used a metaphor that caught my attention and also taught me something about research. The metaphor the “iceberg of research” helps you visualize how to formulate your research when writing a paper. The illustration of the iceberg shows the research topic as the tip and all of your resources as the body of the iceberg. This metaphor helps because people limit themselves when writing. They only look online or read on autobiography but there is an array of resources to be explored. This article teaches you to move on from the basics and look at other material. Searching for sources may be overwhelming but the more information you discover the better your research will be.
It is easy for the writer’s voice to become lost among all this research, when referring to someone else’s thoughts it is easy for your opinion to not be present. The article tells us to add our voice to theirs; a research paper is like having an argument among the sources that you have found. The article refers to this as a conversation. This iceberg metaphor illustrates the basis of a research paper in a way that is easy to understand and the conversation concept goes right along with it. If we think of research as a conversation it doesn’t seem as overwhelming, we are simply finding what others have said before us and adding our opinions to it.

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