On Apr 7, 2008, at 8:00 PM, Ron Ritzman wrote:
I wasn't trying to argue that it was. I was asking if the phrase "all
research is original" summed up the following paragraph in the
original post.
"Indeed, the opposite is increasingly widely accepted. One of the
major
composition texts these days is called _Everything's an Argument_, and
makes the case, essentially, that one cannot organize information
without advancing an argument. Research is always an interpretive and
synthetic process, and any presentation of research advances a
position."
That's not a bad summary - it suffers a bit from the ambiguity in the
noun "research" where it can refer both to the process of reading
sources and to the process of drawing conclusions about the sources.
But if you're careful to note that all conclusions drawn from sources
are original then you're pretty much spot on.
(Which, incidentally, does not mean that all conclusions drawn from
sources are novel or unique or unusual. When I read a source I may and
likely will come to the same conclusion as other people who have read
the source. But I came to that conclusion on my own, not by lifting it
clearly and transparently from somewhere else.)
-Phil