Works for Advanced Writers

Offering advanced writers the opportunity to present their research findings in the form of an I-Search paper yields a more enriching experience for them and a better "read" for their audience. In the past 2 years, students in upper-level undergraduate courses--like Advanced Composition and Teaching and Evaluating Writing and graduate courses such as The Teaching of Writing and a seminar on Mark Twain--have been encouraged to explore a personal area of interest in-depth and produce a major semester-long writing project known as an I-Search paper. Unlike a typical research paper which focuses mostly on reporting just the results of research from an analytical, objective narrative point-of-view, the I-Search paper requires students to carefully consider and document their research and writing processes as well as their ultimate findings and to tell the story of the entire search--including the results--in a personal, first-person voice. While research paper traditionalists might be persuaded that "the story of the search" plays a role in reporting, they would expect to see evidence of research. The I-Search paper does not disappoint.