Academic Research and Project Design I. Research and Design —(1) ___ is a spring of creation while interest is a power source fo

Academic Research and Project Design
    In this lecture, we are going to talk about something concerning research and design. Why should we have this stuff in our writing class? You became curious and raise a question in relation to the focus of this lesson. Well, (1) an easy way to interpret the relationship between these two things is; Curiosity is a spring of creation. Interest is a power source for motivation. Research learning can greatly satisfy your needs in these two aspects. Then why do we need planning in our academic writing? This is really a great question. Here are some explanations.
    Suppose you have a good idea about something in your study, which can be the result of a curious study of an issue. You may want to see if this idea is really important and meaningful to your study or your work, and see if you are motivated by a strong interest in this issue. What should you do at the beginning of this attempt? You can start by designing a good research plan for your project. (2) Can you see the importance of designing for scientific research? It gives you a starting point from which you can take off.
    Writing is a difficult job. Learning how to write in a foreign language is more difficult. But academic writing in English is the most difficult thing for all non-native speakers. When you take up your big project in this writing class,you are exposed to academic writing. If you want to do a good job in this training,what you need most is how to make a meaningful outline so that other things will come out in a natural way.
    Our discussion concerning the big project training is arranged into two successive units. First,in this unit we are going to identify some important things in project designing. Then, in the next unit we will present you a research design we have made for our research project in e-leaming. Keep this in mind: You have to know that it will take much time and energy to do research and you cannot expect to carry out a good project at one stroke. For this reason,we hope that you will follow us and get ready for more details that will come out as we move on together. Interested students are encouraged to go to the next unit for more information concerning the big project training.
    When doing research,the first important thing is to choose a good topic. "Good" is a rather vague expression in this case. (3) Alternatively, we mean that you must choose a meaningful topic from a lot of possibilities and write something about it. For instance, if you want to do a study of how people celebrate a given festival, you can choose a more meaningful topic by focusing on one of many possible events that may take place on this special occasion. (4) Most of our research can be defined as a problem study of something. Put another way, we want to identify some big problems in our research and try to find out possible solutions to them. (4) Reasoning in this way, you may soon understand why in your research design you need to say a few words about your research questions. By a rather loose definition,a research question can be regarded as the most important and specific problems you want to answer in your study. A satisfactory treatment of this question,we believe,will help you have a better understanding of the whole issue you are addressing.
    A good plan means a lot of things for a successful research project. According to our teaching and research experiences, (5) when you are in the first stage of academic writing,you need to consider the following factors in your designing: Categorization, Hierarchy and Perspective. These three factors are interdependent and correlated with each other. (6) If you change a factor you need to make further adjustments to the other factors as well. Otherwise, you cannot expect to have a good design. In addition, this model will be a very effective way to solve the problem of non-originality and overlap in your research design. Functionally speaking,a perspective implies a given way you select to examine, analyze, and discuss your research questions. The reason for you to have a certain perspective is that it will be likely to provide you with a chance to do things in a different and creative way.
    Above are some important factors we identify in a research design task. Below are some strategies you may turn to whenever you need them.
    1. Choosing something meaningful and interesting so that you would like to write something about it.
    2. Selecting something practical and economical so that you can deal with it easily and comfortably.
    3. (10) Choosing something familiar so that you do not need to kill yourself, while still doing a good job.
    Choosing a meaningful topic is necessary but not enough. You must also try to find something more and relevant issues into a good piece of writing. We usually do this by setting up a variety of associations. (8) Associations are things that are naturally or logically related to a general idea or topic you want to look at in your research paper.
    Do not stay at the surface level of discussion. (9) You need to go deeper in your discussion by narrowing down the scope of your discussion or investigation. A far too common mistake committed by novice researchers is that they tend to thrust everthing they happen to come upon into the project. A good researcher must learn how to select and give up.
    What we discuss above are some fundamental principles and basic strategies for you to do a research project of your own. Move on with us and you will get more tips and incentives for writing a nice research paper. Thanks for your attention.