Relevant Research

Murray says in chapter thirteen that the researcher must have the courage take his eye off the ball when writing a paper. Murray then tries to reconcile the fact that a researcher must have the courage to take his eye off the ball with the fact that in order to be an effective researcher you need to be organized and focused. Murray makes the point that if we always keep our eye on the ball our research becomes boring and irrelevant. We do not want to write papers that are unoriginal with nothing to add to the subject we are writing on. However, I would argue that we do not need to take our eye off the ball in order to make good research. Rather I would argue we need to look at the ball from different perspectives. We need to use our curiosity to look at all angles of the issue thereby making our research relevant.

I really liked the point that Murray and Dr. Schut’s point made about using counter voices in research. This makes writing a lot more interesting and easy to do. I like the idea of a research paper being a conversation with the reader and the other experts in the field. This in my opinion will lead to a much more engaging and thought provoking papers.