From the notebook to the bibliography

Every spring, students who spent the year writing for a school paper get handed a research essay assignment and discover that they already know most of how to do it. They know how to find people who know things. They know how to take notes that someone else could check. They know that a claim without a source gets a question mark from the editor.

What they often do not know is how those habits translate. A news story attributes; a research essay cites. A reporter interviews; a researcher reads. The skills are cousins, and the old stories in The Light show both the family resemblance and the places where the two crafts part ways.

Attribution is citation with the paperwork removed

Read the December 2015 explainer The Syrian Refugee Story with a pencil and mark every number. There are a lot of them: an estimated 9 million Syrians who had fled out of roughly 23 million before the war, more than 3 million in neighboring countries, a UN prediction of 7.6 million internally displaced, 4 million registered refugees, 1,500 admitted to the United States, a petition with more than 54,000 signatures, $1 billion in American aid that year.

Only two of those figures say where they came from. The displacement forecast is credited to the UN, and the expectation that U.S. admissions would double by the end of the year is credited to State Department spokesman John Kirby. The Kirby sentence is the model: the reader knows who said it, knows how much weight to give it, and can check it.

The rest may well match whatever the writer read in late 2015, but the reader has no way to know where they came from. One of them, "$8.4 million to meet all their needs," is the kind of figure that should make a writer stop and go back to the source, because the scale of everything else in the paragraph suggests a much larger number. A research essay would not allow any of them to stand without a citation. In a sense the research essay is just a news story where every attribution has to be complete enough for a stranger to find the original.

Go one step closer to the source

The 2018 scouting feature Could You Earn your Adventure Badge like Russell from "UP"? is one of the most thoroughly reported stories in the archive. It interviews an Eagle Scout teacher and students from three scouting programs, explains the October 2017 decision to open Boy Scouts programs to girls, and ends with a list of cited sources and a short history of each organization.

At one point it quotes a news article summarizing a 2011 study in the journal Gender & Society, which found that science made up only 2 percent of Girl Scout activities and 6 percent of Boy Scout activities. For a feature, quoting a reliable summary is acceptable. For a research essay, it is a step too far from the evidence. The writer had even linked the study's abstract, so the stronger move was right there: cite the study, report its numbers directly, and mention the news coverage only if it adds something.

The rule of thumb is easy to remember. Cite the closest source to the evidence that you actually read. If you read the summary, cite the summary and say so. If you can read the study, read it.

That feature, incidentally, is now itself a source. It is cited in Wikipedia's article on scouting in popular culture, and the 2014 profile A Look At MA Vignola '16 is cited in Wikipedia's list of people from Cincinnati, with the writer, the date and the paper's name in the footnote. Student journalism enters the record more often than students expect. Write every piece as if someone will check it later, because someone might.

What the formats are for

Teachers at SUA who used Turnitin told The Light in 2016 that one of its main benefits was teaching students how to cite, especially in MLA style for literature essays (The Infamous Fact Checker). In college, many students meet a second system: APA, which psychology, education, nursing and most social sciences use. The formats look fussy, but each part answers a reader's question. Who wrote this? When? Where can I find it?

Here is what the Vignola profile looks like as an APA reference, using what the page itself tells us:

Shanley, V. (2014, September 9). A look at MA Vignola '16. The Light. https://suathelight.com/post/a-look-at-ma-vignola-16

Author's last name and initial, date with the year first because the social sciences care about how recent a finding is, title in sentence case, publication name in italics, link. For the parts students most often get wrong, such as how to cite a source with no author, how to handle a direct quotation in the text, and when to include page numbers, a plain walk-through of APA title pages, in-text citations and reference lists is worth keeping open while you write.

Where reporting and research part ways

Three differences catch former newspaper staffers off guard.

First, the thesis. A news story is allowed to end without a conclusion; it reports, and the reader decides. A research essay must argue something, and every paragraph has to earn its place by supporting that argument. Many of the explainers in the archive, such as the one on the Syrian crisis, would become research essays only after the writer decided what she believed the evidence showed.

Second, the sources themselves. Reporters lean on interviews because quotes are the raw material of news. Research essays lean on published work, and an interview with a classmate is weak evidence for almost any academic claim. Interviews still have a place, especially in essays about local history or school policy, but they should sit beside documents, not replace them.

Third, voice. The Light's writers often spoke directly to the reader, asked questions, made jokes. Most research assignments want a cooler register. That does not mean dull. It means that the evidence, not the writer's personality, carries the reader from paragraph to paragraph.

Working method for the first research essay

• Start a source log on day one: author, title, date, where you found it, and the page or paragraph for each note.
• Write the thesis as a sentence someone could disagree with, then test whether your sources can support it.
• Draft the body before the introduction. Introductions are easier to write once you know what you proved.
• Mark every number and every quote in your draft and confirm each one has a citation next to it, exactly the way you would mark up the Syrian story above.
• Read the draft aloud. Sentences that trip you up will trip your reader.

Some students find the jump from newsroom to research paper easy and some do not. If the structure is what keeps falling apart, it helps to work with a tutor who goes through the draft with you rather than one who rewrites it, so the habits stay yours. The reporting instincts you already have, curiosity, skepticism, respect for the source, are the hard part. The paperwork can be learned in an afternoon.