Research Tips for Graduate Students by Professor Larry J. Reynolds

Dr. Reynolds가 예전 수업시간에 나눠 준 메모가 이젠 너덜너덜해져서 이렇게라도 여기에남겨야겠단 생각이 들었다.

제대로 실행하지는 않았지만 이젠학위논문을쓸 때라 다시 한번 상기해본다.

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1) Attend to small details:

When you read, be alert to a word, an image, an allusion, a gap or absence that piques your interest and curiosity. Research into such small matters can often open out into unexplored fields of materials and ideas. Also, such an inductive appraoch, as opposed to a deductive one that brings a theoretical framework to bear upon a text, tends to yield more original and valuable scholarship.

2) Keep a journal:

As a scholar, the most valuable things you can collect are your own ideas and insights, so you need a repository for them. Memory loss can be wonderful, but your best thoughts deserve prerservation. Emerson called his journal his "saving banks," and indeed all his lectures, essays, and books began with journal entries, notable for their immediacy and vitality. You'll find that upon re-reading what you have written, that you can impress and inspire, as well as help, yourself. You can also track the development of your thought over time.

3) Historicize:

If your goal as a scholar is to find and reveal meanings lost through the passage of time, one of the best ways to proceed is synchronically. You cannot escape presentism, that is, coming at things from your own time and place and system of values; however, you can approach originary meanings by using letters, journals, an author's readings, plus contemporaneous books, magazines, newspapers, paintings, photographs, monuments, and so on. You should know that art is based upon culture, that is, upon the web of meanings surrounding one, not upon mere senseimpressions, andeven writers and painters that subscribe to the cult of experience, are influenced by various mediations. To understand them andtheir art thus requires that you know theirmediated worlds.

4) Takerisks:

Never be afraid to venture forth with an ideathat may seem too unusual, controversial, or impolitic. Fortune favors the brave. Be willing to test your ideas or findings in class discussion, conference papers, and grant proposals. Conference papers, especially, give one the opportunity to be speculative and outrageous, even humorous, and the comment they provoke, often in the form of "Have you read such and such," can advance your projects usefully.

5) Put words on the page:

As you begin to work on a larger projects, a book or dissertation, you'll find that researching and note-taking are enjoyable and addictive; however, make yourself start writing very early in the process, otherwise the research itself will spin out of control and become endless. You often don't know what it is you need to find out until your try to express yourself in your own words, so do that reqularly. In fact, plug away, putting words on the page, evne when you feel discouraged and uninspired. It's the only way you can ever complete a large project.

6) Seek readers and readings:

The scholarly profession depends and thrives upon feedback from peers, colleagues, professors, editors, and friends. Thus, give your manuscript to others to read, after you have done all you can tomake it as substantial and polished as youcan. Don't give it to a numebr of readers at the same time, in parallel, but rather sequentially, in series, revising and improvingit as you proceed. If you receive a reader's report from a journal or press, read it carefully and, if atall possible, revise and resubmit, stressing the positive, ignoring all you think is wrong-headed about the report.Maintain confidence in your ownefforts and most of all, foucs on your work, not recognition.