Sura and VanEyk Writing the Methods 173 Writing the Methods Rethinking Research Paper Conventions in First-Year Writing Tom Sura and Kristin VanEyk Introduction In the opening of his 2002 essay on writing program administrators as post- modern planners, Tim Peeples lists the many metaphors that scholars have used as lenses to examine their work. They range from directing a film, to plate twirling, to even plate tectonics. As explanation, Peeples (2002: 116) suggests that the different metaphors give scholars “new eyes for seeing the work we do and, in doing so, often expose parts of our work to which we have become blind.” In a sense, that is what this essay is about. It is about exposing a part of teaching composition to which we are often blind: knowledge of the methods students use to investigate their research questions. The spring of 2023 threw this gap into greater relief with an existen- tial crisis for writing instruction. ChatGPT, one example of what is more broadly known as generative AI, sent the education industry into a frenzy scrambling to understand how to respond to, use, and even police the new technology (Schroeder 2024; MLA-CCCC 2023). There is still a great deal of trepidation about how students will ethically (or unethically) use the technol- ogy, but the technology itself is not really a game changer for educators who changed their games years ago. If anything, the new technology reinforces the importance of teaching writing as a process that includes discussion, feedback, revision, and reflection. While the days of assigning a paper and then collecting it three weeks later for a summative grade may be over, writing instruction is still alive and well. Even so, the advent of generative AI is pressing writing teachers to look at their work with new eyes. In our own analysis, we see first-year writing (FYW) as a context that places tremendous emphasis on process; however, blind spots still remain. In this essay, we argue for a revision of the conven- tional research paper to include students’ articulations of their methods, simi- lar to how scholars researching in social or natural sciences might write their methods. We contend that pursuing this revision to how we teach research Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pedagogy/article-pdf/25/2/173/2257433/173sura.pdf?guestAccessKey=db27cc78-d7fa-4289-8249-355284f4faf4 by guest on 23 July 2025