The Writing Arts department of Rowan University presents "Core II: Research Methods for Writers" as a course that 

surveys non-quantitative research methods writers use. This class examines techniques of print and on-line research, interviewing, and case studies to develop the ability to weigh and assess the reliability and relevance of information. Students will learn to identify and present problems in writing using different perspectives and learn how these research styles guide a writer's interpretation of information. The course prepares students to develop their own descriptive research projects.

However, the course purpose has evolved somewhat from this skeletal description.

Intention of the course:

To leave each and every student:

• dwelling in a new world of research and writing;

• ​coming from a created future out of which the MA project unfolds in the present;

• taking appropriate and effective actions to fulfill on their invented projects as a function of free self-expression.

A Central Premise and Guiding Principle

Fundamentally, this course is designed to serve as a vehicle for students to invent a project worthy to pursue in their final year of the MA in Writing (Seminar I and II). 

A central premise of Core II: Research Methods for Writers is that human beings always and already have projects, or more accurately stated, we are always already in a project. Most of us have projects we have inherited from others, and very few of us have made those inherited projects our own, and even fewer have created an entirely "original" project.

The power of research, then, is to generate new knowledge that not only impacts our projects, but also impacts the quality of life itself. Such knowledge at first will be new to you, but at some point, if your research leads you up to the very limits of what has already been discovered, you may even create knowledge that is also new to a discourse community equipped to evaluate it as new. While you will not be expected to generate new knowledge for a discourse community, you are expected to discover for yourself what you uncover in your research, so that you own that "new" knowledge, individualizing what you discover within your unfolding project.

Our guiding principle in this course will be to work together to confront the limits of our current understanding of research, and hopefully find joy in pushing beyond such limits, to perhaps awaken a new possibility of research and writing for you. How that will look will depend entirely on what you yourself create in the process.

Here is where I stand in the matter of research and writing: When practiced with integrity, authenticity, responsibility, and when practiced inside of being committed to something greater than yourself, research and writing together will open up the possibility to transform who you are as a writer and researcher, and allow your work to even impact the communities you are a member of.