Welcome to the RPIR Blog

This blog is designed primarily for undergraduate students undertaking research in the social sciences and more particularly in the fields of politics and international relations. It emerges from and supports a second year module I coordinate at the University of Lincoln in the UK entitled, Researching and Politics and International Relations. The blog does not aim to provide a systematic introduction to social research, rather it is a repository for  an eclectic collection of comments, observations and advice about the research process that I have used in my teaching over a number of years. Although it is designed for students of the social sciences, and politics and IR in particular, the focus is on the research process more broadly and as such it draws on examples from a diverse range of fields from the natural sciences to mountaineering. Some of the comments will undoubtedly be light-hearted, some less so, but feel free to dip in, and chip in.  Dr Andrew Defty adefty@lincoln.ac.uk

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Writers on writing: John Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is most well known as an international relations theorist and a strong advocate of the realist school. He has written several books on international relations including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Why Leaders Lie: the truth about lying in international politics and most recently The Great Delusion: liberal dreams and international relations. He has also written numerous articles in academic journals as well op-ed pieces in a diverse range of publications including The New York Times, The Sydney Morning Herald and the London Review of Books. If you haven’t read his work, you really should.

Clearly Mearsheimer knows a thing or two about writing. I came across the following tips on writing provided by Mearsheimer as part of an online discussion several years ago. (In truth someone recently tweeted Mearsheimer’s comments and because I wanted to include them here, and also because I’m a good scholar, I tracked down the original source which was an online discussion on Reddit several years ago). As part of the discussion which ranged widely across Mearsheimer’s work and current challenges in international relations, one participant asked Mearsheimer how he communicated his ideas so well and what tips he could offer to aspiring political scientists to help them become better writers. Mearsheimer’s response provided a short but extremely valuable summary of the keys to good writing:

I think the keys are to: 1) use simple language and minimize as much as possible the use of jargon; 2) organize your thoughts in outline form before writing and make sure that they fit together, kind of like building blocks; 3) make sure every paragraph has a terrific topic sentence and contains only one core thought; 4) put a short paragraph at the start of each major section of the paper signalling to the reader what will follow; 4) write as if you were bent on telling your story to your mother or father, who do not know much about the subject at hand, but are well-educated and interested to hear what you have to say. In other words, think of yourself as a great communicator, someone who can explain complex ideas to educated and smart people of all sorts. I hope that helps.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Robert Caro on the research process

I have mentioned in a previous post, and may well mention again, Robert Caro’s excellent little book on the research process, Working: researching, interviewing, writing. Caro, who is most famous for his multi-volume biography of US President Lyndon Johnson, draws on his many years of experience to provide a wealth of advice and tips for the researcher.

To say Caro is thorough is an understatement, his biographies are the product of many years of research. On being appointed as an investigative reporter early in his career, Caro was heavily influenced by the remarks of his editor who told him:

Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page (p.11).

When he came to research the life of Lyndon Johnson, Caro eventually realised that it is simply not possible to turn every page, but in the several decades he has committed to researching Johnson’s life and times he’s given it a pretty good shot.

While Caro has devoted an enviable amount of time and resources to his research, his rigour and careful step-by-step approach to the research process has much to teach those working on less ambitious projects.

When students embark upon a large research project there is a natural tendency to want to dive straight into the data, to begin interviews, undertake surveys, carry out documentary analysis or archival research. In an interview in Paris Review, which is repeated in full Working, Caro is asked simply “how do you research a subject?” His response provides what I think is a really clear explanation of the proper way to approach research, and in particular the importance of getting on top of the secondary material – doing the reading – before one thinks about embarking on the collection of primary data. It is a simple explanation but no less valuable for that:

First you read the books on the subject, then you go to the big newspapers, and all the magazines – Newsweek, Life, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Star.; then you go to the newspapers from the little towns. If Johnson made a campaign stop there, you want to see how it’s covered in the weekly newspaper.

Then the next thing you do is the documents. There’s the Lyndon Johnson papers, but also the papers of everyone else – Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower – whom he dealt with. Or for The Power Broker, Al Smith’s papers, the Herbert Lehman papers, the Harriman papers, the La Guardia papers…

The presidency is different. There’s no hope of reading it all. You’d need several lifetimes. But you want to try to do as much as possible, because you never know what you will find. If its something really important, like a civil rights file, from 1964, 1965, or voting rights, you want to see everything. So I called for everything. But otherwise, you know you’re not seeing a substantial percentage. You hope you’re seeing everything that really matters, but you always have this feeling, What’s in the rest?…

Then come the interviews. You try and find everybody who is alive who dealt with Johnson in any way in this period. Some people you interview over and over. There was this Johnson speechwriter, Horace Busby. I interviewed him twenty-two times. These were the formal interviews. We also had a lot of informal telephone chats… (pp.194-195).

Robert A. Caro, Working: researching, interviewing, writing, London: Bodley Head, 2019.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Peer review explained by Professor Brian Cox

Peer review is a process designed to ensure the quality, more specifically the reliability and validity of material which is published in academic journals. It is absolutely central to the development of academic knowledge and provides a barrier to unfounded or poorly researched material finding its way into print. Articles submitted to academic journals are usually subject to a process of blind review by at least two other scholars who have been selected because of their expertise in the field covered by the article. People are not allowed to review their own work, and although they may be asked to review work by people they know, because articles are anonymised they should not know this when undertaking the review. There are flaws in this process but it remains considerably more robust than the free-for-all dissemination of claims that one finds on the internet and in other non-peer reviewed publications.

The process of peer review and its importance is described neatly in this short extract from the BBC series, Science Britannica presented by Professor Brian Cox, which was broadcast in 2013. Professor Cox is talking about the natural sciences, the process is the same for the social sciences and other disciplines. As he notes, although the process is not without its flaws, and its critics, it remains central

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Struggling with the word limit? Follow Churchill’s advice on brevity

One of the most common complaints from students approaching the end of a piece of written work is that they simply can’t do justice to the question within the permitted word limit. This is as true for 10,000 word dissertations as for short assignments of less than a 1,000 words. Yet whenever I read through students’ work it is rare to find examples in which the word count could not be significantly reduced simply by tightening up overwritten phrasing. It is also usually the case that far from reducing the impact of the work, removing words often provides for a much clearer argument.

This is not something which is peculiar to academic writing, although students and academics are perhaps more guilty than most. Government ministers are required to read and digest a large number of official reports often on complex issues, but understandably favour clarity and brevity over lengthy verbosity. Perhaps the most famous appeal for brevity in official reports was made by Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in 1940 when he wrote the following short memo for his civil servants appealing for an end to ‘officialese jargon’. Churchill was fighting a war and clearly pressed for time, but there is much we can all learn from his advice:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Writers on writing: Robert Caro

Robert Caro is an American journalist and historian most famous for his multi-volume biography of the US President, Lyndon Johnson. As a journalist accustomed to working to producing pithy copy to tight deadlines, and a biographer whose monumental studies are the product of decades of research and run to many thousands of pages, Caro’s experience of the process of research and writing is broad and diverse.

Caro recently published a short book on his experience of writing and the research process, entitled Working. Partly autobiographical, it is an entertaining and informative book which mixes anecdote with tips and techniques for research and writing, drawing on Caro’s decades of experience. A clue to Caro’s approach is in the title, Working. For Caro writing is a job, something he must do every day in order to pay the rent. When he is writing books, Caro doesn’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, he gets up each day, sits at his desk and writes. This, he notes, is just as important (perhaps more so) when writing books as when producing stories to short deadlines for a newspaper. In an interview included in the book, Caro is asked whether he sets daily quotas for writing, to which he replies:

I have to, because I have a wonderful relationship with my editor and my publisher. I have no real deadlines. I’m never asked, When are you going to deliver? So it’s easy to fool yourself that you’re really working hard when you’re not. And I’m naturally lazy. So what I do is – people laugh at me – I put on a jacket and a tie to come to work, because when I was young everybody wore jackets and ties to work, and I want to remind myself that I’m going to a job. I have to produce. I write down how many words I’ve done in a day. Not to the word – I count the lines. I do it as we used to do in the newspaper business, ten words to a line. I do a lot of little things to try to make me remember it’s a job. I try to do at least three pages a day. Some days you don’t, but without some kind of quota, I think you’re fooling yourself (p.201).

As students and scholars, we do work to deadlines, but those deadlines, particularly for things like dissertations, PhD theses and books, are often long in advance and in some cases movable, as a result it is, as Caro suggests, easy to put off writing for another day while you do something else –  shuffle papers, trawl through the internet in search of another source and fool yourself that you’re working when you’re not.

At the same time while Caro is an advocate of treating writing like a job, he also stresses the importance of working slowly and most importantly, of taking the time to think. He recalls his experience of enrolling on a creative writing programme early in his career in which he was required to write a short story every two weeks. Caro notes that, like many students, he always wrote his stories at the last minute, recalling ‘more than one all-nighter to get my assignment in on time.’ While he was confident in his ability to do this and always got his work in on time, Caro’s Professor told him that he was fooling himself about the amount of preparation and effort he was putting into his work and added, ‘you’re never going to achieve what you want to, Mr Caro, if you don’t stop thinking with your fingers.’ As Caro admits, he knew he could write and by writing frantically at the last minute produce the goods but writing and writing quickly at the last minute was not a substitute for careful thought and preparation:

No real thought, just writing – because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had also been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realise the complexity of the subject, realised that a lot of thinking would be required – thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of – I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That was why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why I still do my first few drafts in longhand today; that is why even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona 210. And yet, even thus slowed down, I will, when I’m writing, set myself the goal of a minimum of a thousand words a day, and, as the chart I keep on my closet door attests, most days meet it (p.xviii).

There is much else to learn from Caro’s instructive book, not least about the research process, but when it comes to writing, set yourself a daily quota and don’t think through your fingers are useful first lessons.

Robert A. Caro, Working: researching, interviewing, writing, London: Bodley Head, 2019.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment