ENGL 1302 - Local Library Research (Ira Walker): Research Process

How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature From drawing a map of a remembered neighborhood to signing a form releasing yourself to take risks in your work, Roorbach offers innovative techniques that will trigger ideas for all writers. Writing Life Stories is a classic text that appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi the world over. This updated 10th anniversary edition gives you the same friendly instruction and stimulating exercises along with updated information on current memoir writing trends, ethics, internet research, and even marketing ideas. You'll discover how to turn your untold life stories into vivid personal essays and riveting memoirs by learning to open up memory, access emotions, shape scenes from experience, develop characters, and research supporting details. This guide will teach you to see your life more clearly and show you why real stories are often the best ones.

"Backwards offers a very helpful perspective on the writing and research process. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates, two-year technical program students, and general readers." -- J. Stevens, George Mason University, CHOICE Nautilus Award 2012 Silver Winner - Creative Process The Backwards Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection and Inspiration demystifies the writing process by inviting writers of all levels to focus on their passions, questions, and obsessions as the key to generating seeds for further exploration of the world around them. Writers then develop these questions into focused projects that explore the teller's central role in the open-ended quest of unfolding a research topic. The boom in narrative journalism, memoir, and creative nonfiction has generated wonderful writing, but no resource for writers exists to bridge the gap between passionate research and the page. This book addresses that gap by turning the task of research on its head and by speaking to students who resist the idea of research as an objective and dry assignment. Students are invited to experiment creatively with collecting observations and information and then to step beyond their subjective realities to interact with the world around them and ultimately become vulnerable authors willing to change their perspectives as they research and write. Developed with input from college student writers, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers is relevant as a text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in composition, creative nonfiction, literary journalism, and feature writing as well as for working journalists and other writers seeking a new way of approaching a writing project.

Recent history--the very phrase seems like an oxymoron. Yet historians have been writing accounts of the recent past since printed history acquired a modern audience, and in the last several years interest in recent topics has grown exponentially. With subjects as diverse as Walmart and disco, and personalities as disparate as Chavez and Schlafly, books about the history of our own time have become arguably the most exciting and talked-about part of the discipline. Despite this rich tradition and growing popularity, historians have engaged in little discussion about the specific methodological, political, and ethical issues related to writing about the recent past. The twelve essays in this collection explore the challenges of writing histories of recent events where visibility is inherently imperfect, hindsight and perspective are lacking, and historiography is underdeveloped. Those who write about events that have taken place since 1970 encounter exciting challenges that are both familiar and foreign to scholars of a more distant past, including suspicions that their research is not historical enough, negotiation with living witnesses who have a very strong stake in their own representation, and the task of working with new electronic sources.

The Information-Literate Historian is the only book specifically designed to teach today's history students how to successfully select and use sources-primary, secondary, and electronic-to carry out and present their research. Expanded and updated, the second edition of TheInformation-Literate Historian continues to be an indispensable reference for historians, students, and other readers doing history research.

With more than three-quarters of a million copies sold since its first publication, The Craft of Research has helped generations of researchers at every level--from first-year undergraduates; to advanced graduate students; to research reporters in business and government--learn how to conduct effective and meaningful research.

Writing History in the Digital Age began as a experiment by posing a question: How have Internet technologies influenced how historians think, teach, author, and publish? To illustrate their answer, the contributors agreed to share the stages of their book-in-progress as it was constructed on the public web. To facilitate this innovative volume, editors Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki designed a born-digital, open-access, and open peer review process to capture commentary from appointed experts and general readers. A customized WordPress plug-in allowed audiences to add page- and paragraph-level comments to the manuscript, transforming it into a socially networked text. The initial six-week proposal phase generated over 250 comments, and the subsequent eight-week public review of full drafts drew 942 additional comments from readers across different parts of the globe. The finished product now presents 20 essays from a wide array of notable scholars, each examining (and then breaking apart and reexamining) if and how digital and emergent technologies have changed the historical profession.

An ideal complement for any history course,A Short Guide to Writing About Historystresses thinking and writing like an historian. This engaging and practical text helps students get beyond merely compiling dates and facts; it teaches them how to incorporate their own ideas into their papers and to tell a story about history that interests them and their peers. Covering brief essays and the documented resource paper, the text explores the writing and researching processes, different modes of historical writing (including argument), and offers guidelines for improving style as well as documenting sources.

The second edition of Essaying the Past features a variety of updates and enhancements to further its standing as an indispensible resource to all aspects of researching and writing historical essays. Includes expert advice on writing about history, conducting good research, and learning how to think analytically Includes a new chapter addressing common situations that represent steps in the transition from a rough first draft to a final version Covers important topics such as framing questions, developing a strong introduction and topic sentences, choosing good evidence, and the crucial role of revision Includes an annotated case study that takes the reader through one student's process of writing an essay, illustrating how strategies in the text can be successfully implemented New edition features updates to cultural references, a newly written preface, and reorganized table of contents