GETTING THE RESEARCH RIGHT

GUEST POST by Catherine Reef

I don’t recall the issue we were debating. It was too long ago, and now it hardly matters. But an idea had been raised in my college sociology class that provoked some heated discussion. At one point a student read a passage from our textbook to support his opinion. The instructor listened and then asked us all, “Do you think the book is right?”

I sat up a little straighter. What was that? Was she suggesting the book might be wrong? The book, that esteemed authority—words printed in black ink and bound in a hard cover—wrong? While the rest of the class argued on, I pondered this startling notion.

As you may have guessed, the most important lesson I learned in Sociology 101 was to be a critical reader. It is one that has served me well as a writer of nonfiction, because again and again in my research I have encountered books that were wrong. I have learned to question, to track down original sources, and to weigh the printed evidence.

I could show how this healthy skepticism has paid off by citing examples from the research that went into nearly every one of my books, including The Brontë Sisters. More than one writer has adopted an authoritative tone, for instance, to write that in 1855 Charlotte Brontë died of tuberculosis, the disease that took the lives of at least four of her five siblings. But how did these authors know this? The answer is that they didn’t; not really. They saw it in another secondary source or jumped to a conclusion after glancing at the facts. The reader or researcher who bothers to investigate Charlotte’s case finds that the cause of her death is uncertain. Her death certificate states that she died of phthisis, a wasting away, but was it due to consumption, as these writers assume, or to the severe intestinal illness that had been plaguing her for weeks? Some authors declare that Charlotte, who was recently married at the time of her death, was pregnant. Charlotte Brontë herself believed this was true, if only because of the severe nausea she was experiencing. Did she actually die of morning sickness, though? It must be noted that the foul water in the Brontës’ village of Haworth was known to carry disease, and a longtime family servant had sickened and died in a similar way only a short time before. So did Charlotte succumb to waterborne contamination? These are all questions I cannot answer. As her biographer, I saw only one way to be honest with my readers and fair to my subject: I described how Charlotte died, but I offered no diagnosis.

So, yes, books can contain factual errors; they can also be wrong, or at least untrustworthy, when it comes to words placed inside quotation marks. Here’s what happens: one writer paraphrases something a subject wrote or said. A second writer repeats the statement word for word and attributes it not to the writer who did the paraphrasing, but to the well-known man or woman whose words were paraphrased in the first place. At some point, as more writers repeat them, the words become enshrined in quotation marks. Content to cite in their endnotes some other secondary source, these writers never check whether the words were ever uttered.

I encountered one of these suspicious quotations when the time came to write about Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Published in 1848, this book was ahead of its time in its frank depiction of alcohol abuse and marital discord. At one point in the narrative, the distraught wife, Helen Huntingdon, bolts her bedroom door against her husband and refuses to let him enter. Now, I am sure such things happened in England in the 1840s, but no one spoke of them above a whisper, and certainly no one wrote of them in a novel. A wife denying her husband access to her bed? Shocking!

“The slamming of Helen Huntingdon’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated through Victorian England,” proclaimed a writer of a later generation, May Sinclair. Or did she? This great quotation appears in a number of critical works, but not one lists a source. Literary detective that I am, I tracked down Sinclair’s actual words in her 1913 book The Three Brontës. And what Sinclair wrote is this: “The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through the emptiness of Anne’s novel.” The second quote is less dramatic than the first, but it is accurate, and it is the one I included in my book, properly sourced. Thus I made a small correction to literary history, but a satisfying one.

Fortunately for us all, authors get their facts right more often than not. Nevertheless, students can be better writers of nonfiction—which is what they are when writing reports or essays—if they read critically. Where did the author get her facts? Check the notes and bibliography. Does he cite primary sources, and is it possible to track them down? Students may not have access to a research library, but many older texts are available online. Do the words “perhaps,” “might have,” and “must have” crop up too often? These are signals that the author is speculating. Students need not be in college to learn to question what they read and to cite printed sources with care.

Because once doubt has been cast on part of a nonfiction work, the rest becomes suspect. We want our readers to trust what we write.

 

   BIO: Catherine Reef has written more than forty nonfiction books for young people and adults, among them The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne and Leonard Bernstein and American Music. Her work has earned her the Sydney Taylor Award and the Joan G. Sugarman Children's Book Award as well as Golden Kite and Jefferson Cup Honors. A graduate of Washington State University, she lives in College Park, Maryland. Visit her online at http://catherinereef.com/index.html

MAKE A SPLASH:OCEAN RESEARCH AND WRITING FUN

guest post by Alison Formento

When I write for magazines or newspapers I must fact check all information I include in an article or essay. I conduct interviews and research whatever topic I’m writing about and it’s no different when I write my nature picture books. My books are considered literary non-fiction. There are fictional elements in my stories in which the trees, bees, or seas talk, but every fact shared has been thoroughly researched and verified by scientists and experts, such as apiarists (beekeepers) for my book These Bees Count! and oceanographers for These Seas Count!

My new picture book These Seas Count! was an exciting book to research since our world’s oceans and seas are fascinating and a vital part of keeping our Earth healthy. Scientists have guessed that there are perhaps a million yet-to-be discovered marine life forms. A million! We know so many amazing sea facts such as there are phytoplankton too small to see which help make our air breathable and there are whales the length of several school buses who can communicate in their own language, but imagine what else we don't know yet about marine life. Our oceans and seas are a place of mystery and wonder and we must care for them as we would a garden in our own backyard.

In my research, I discovered underwater coral called Sea Fan and used that as the name for the boat in These Seas Count! Here’s a way students can use research to make a splash in their own writing.

1. Students draw an ocean, beach, and sky scene. Drawing a scene can help inspire creative thinking, especially for those students who may have a hard time getting started on a writing project.

2. Free-write names of sea life that make the beach or ocean its home. Example, write “Whale” in the water part of the picture or “Gull” in the sky part of the picture. The goal is to fill the page with as many of these words as possible to use in drafting an essay.

3. Research books, magazines, educational websites, and ocean links to find a sea creature that you’ve never heard of before, such as the new Zombie Worm recently discovered in the Antarctic Ocean. There are links to several wonderful educational ocean websites on the Educator’s Guide for These Seas Count! (found on my website) including this one: http://oceana.org/en/explore/marine-wildlife.

4. List at least five facts on one new sea creature. Include this new creature on drawing.

5. Use ocean drawing to inspire writing. How does that new creature, like the Sea Fan or Zombie Worm interact with other creatures on the ocean drawing?

6. Write about this creature using the five facts discovered through research. Share information as if writing for someone who has never been to the ocean.

7. Make a splash using personal knowledge of the ocean, along with newly discovered facts, to draft an essay that is both interesting and fun to research, to write, and to read.

Alison Formento is the author of This Tree Counts!, This Tree, 1, 2, 3, These Bees Count!, and These Seas Count! For more about Alison visit her website: www.alisonashleyformento.com