Q&R 5: Why do students write research papers as narrative essays?

One of the reasons why students do that write narrative essay in place of a research paper is because they don’t have much experience with research papers and they are used to the simple pattern of narrative essays. Students tend to write in the way they are most comfortable with and so when they have to write in a new way, they have difficulty adjusting to the transition because they aren’t use to it. According to the article, this is known as writer-based prose which is when a student “organizes what should be an expository analysis as a narrative, especially when she writes a narrative about how she did her research” (78). Students start to narrate how they are going to write their paper and explain what they wrote. By doing so, students are now writing a narrative essay rather than the research paper that they were supposed to do. However, that is not only the students’ fault; it is also the professors’. This is due to the fact that the professors don’t explain clearly what they want and they don’t really teach the students anything about textual sources and how to use them in their essays. To prove my point the article mentions that “Professors may have to do some preparatory teaching about why certain kinds of texts have certain characteristics and what kinds of problems writers must solve as they design text for a particular audience. They may have to teach a model for the kind of writing they expect.” (78). If the professors aren’t clear about how they want their research papers to be done, then the student will not write a research paper; he/she will instead start to narrative essay because they won’t know what to do.

By: Denise Valdez