cdmandrews.github.io

ENGL 3301, Fall 2021

Research

Sorry, gang. This is college. That means research and stuff. This page includes information on:

1. Distinctions between primary and secondary research
2. Finding materials in scholarly journals
3. Journals you could look in for secondary research

Primary & Secondary research

“Primary” and “secondary” research are an old-fashioned shorthand for distinguishing between different kinds of research. The distinction is messy and not the most important thing in the world, but I used it and now I have to explain it. :) Also, different disciplines collect information in different ways, and thus will define source types in different ways, too. The hard part here is that I’m inviting you into the role of writing researcher: we’re looking at writing itself as the phenomenon of interest, so there’s great potential for these lines to blur and be confusing. Hang with me!

The distinction between primary and secondary has to do with who observes a phenomenon and who writes research based on that information. Primary research is research providing or reporting on first-hand evidence gathered by the author. Research articles that report on experiments, document case studies, discuss interviews the researcher did, or describe text or content analysis are primary research, because the researcher is providing firsthand evidence they themselves observed and analyzed. Secondary research is research where the author describes, interprets, and analyzes information they obtained from other sources (often, but not always, primary sources). Review articles, books, or textbooks that summarize and connect the primary research of others are secondary research.

In this project, you’re doing primary research when you:

• look at and analyze your examples of technical and professional communication
• interview people in the profession that write or create or have to use that communication
• use interviews about tpc from sources like workplace-writing.org

And you’re doing secondary research when you:

• read and summarize research, magazine, internet, or news articles to collect basic information about your topic
• quote and cite materials from your textbook, course readings, and my class materials
• quote and cite material from Miles Kimball’s article “The Golden Age of Technical Communication” or Adam Pope’s chapter “Writing in Genres”
• read and summarize (and quote and cite…) research articles about technical and professional communication
• read and summarize (and quote and cite…) research articles about communicating in a particular profession

The confusing part for you, especially in this class where I’m asking you to take on this new-to-you role of “writing researcher,” is that defining a source as primary or secondary can depend on how you’re using the material. A research report, newsletter article, or trade journal article could both be primary and secondary. For example, if you’re writing about TC in orthopedics:

• You want to analyze a research paper from an orthopedics journal as an example of professional and technical writing. That’s your primary research. For example, if you were to describe the use of a near-IMRAD format, technical language, tables, and visuals in the article “Delayed hospital admission for traumatic hip fractures during the COVID-19 pandemic,” in that case, you’re not researching delayed hospital admission, you’re looking at the article as an example of the phenomenon of technical and professional communication. That’s your primary research.

• You decide to look for research papers about the use of IMRAD formats (or medical jargon, or whatever) in health sciences. That’s your secondary research. For example, the article: “The introduction, methods, results, and discussion (IMRAD) structure: a fifty-year survey” examines the history of the IMRAD structure and might be a source if you were researching structure and format in health research communication. The article is a someone else’s research findings and a way for you to enter the conversation about technical and professional communication in health sciences. That’s your secondary research.

• Hang on, because here’s the confusing part: for the authors of both articles, their research papers are the result of their direct observation of the phenomenon and thus primary research. In the first case, the authors did a statistical analysis on data they collected; in the second case, the authors analyzed the structure of published articles they collected. The difference for us is that we’re not health researchers–we’re WRITING RESEARCHERS and are looking at writing itself as the phenomenon of interest.

I know, that can be confusing. This guide from the Virginia Tech libraries might be useful.

Regardless of the option you picked for Project 2, you must include the following as research for your project:

1. Three (3) examples of technical and professional communication (whether professional docs, or tactical tech comm) that you’re evaluating yourself
2. Three (3) scholarly or trade journal articles that help you analyze and evaluate the examples you’re looking at OR help you situate them in a larger conversation about technical and professional writing
   • One of these will be either Miles Kimball’s article “The Golden Age of Technical Communication” or Adam Pope’s chapter “Writing in Genres”
3. Material from our textbooks, course readings, or my notes, which will help you analyze and evaluate the examples you’re looking at. Particularly useful will be:
   • Chapter 1: Introduction to Technical Writing by Cassandra Race, from Week 01.
   • “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making” by Doug Downs, from Week 03.
   • “Academic disciplines and professional literacies” by Marlena Stanford and Justin Jory, from week 9.
   • Use other chapters or articles we’ve read to help you define and talk about things like accessibility, document design, writing style, subheadings, lists, figures and tables, professionalism, ethics, BLUF and bite/snack/meal and summaries, parallelism, the 7Cs,

Finding materials in scholarly journals

Your goal with your secondary research is not to find examples, but instead to find your way in to a larger conversation about technical and professional communciation. What are other researchers and professionals saying about the genres or writing situations you’re looking at? What research has been done about the particular rhetorical feature or strategy you’re looking at in your examples? Do they define a term in a particularly useful way, or talk about the importance or prevalence of a practice? Do they provide recommendations for practitioners or writers (or teachers) in a discipline? For example:

• what do researchers say about the use of medical jargon in orthopedics?
• is there research about about communication strategies in community policing?
• is there research about the genres veterinarians or teachers or social workers write most frequently?
• what do research say about how marketing firms can make use of user-generated content?

Don’t start with google.com. Not because Google is bad or evil, but because Google will bring you everything and the kitchen sink and maybe or maybe not the kinds of scholarly, edited, peer-reviewed research studies I (and your other professors) am asking you to turn to.

At the very least, start your search with Google Scholar: scholar.google.com, which is a specalized version of google’s search that lets you search broadly for scholarly sources in a lot of different disciplines and formats.

Don’t overlook the library databases. The multi-search can be a little intimidating, but with practice you’ll be a pro. I frequently toggle between both Google Scholar and library databases to find precisely the kinds of scholarship I need.

This video introduces how to use the Mary & Jeff Bell Library’s multi-search to locate and access research materials:

Mary and Jeff Bell Library homepage

Good sources for scholarly, peer-reviewed, or professional-quality research about writing in your field

I recommend starting with the following journals, which publish writing and communication-focused research that frequently intersections with specific disciplinary topics. You can use multi-search or google scholar and search for the journal title and whatever keywords you’d like to use, or just start with your keyword search in Google Scholar and see what you find.

• Journal of Business and Technical Communication
• Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
• Written Communication
• Technical Communication
• Technical Communication Quarterly (usefully, this journal has published a lot about tactical tech comm)
• Connexions: International Professional Communication Journal
• International Journal of Business Communication
• IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
• English for Specific Purposes

You can probably also find a journal that’s specifically about communication in a specialized field or profession:

• Communication and Medicine
• Science communication
• Environmental communication
• Journal of health communication
• Journal of communication in healthcare

Writers of all abilities and experience levels can benefit from appointments with a Writing Consultant in the CASA Writing Center. Formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors can make your documents difficult to read and understand or can undermine your content.