Why Research Matters: Real World Writers
Al Franken
It's hard to make an original argument, certainly, based on no research. It's my only nod to technology. That you can, you know, type in a word, say, you know, 'nicotine,' and it'll, you know, say too many, you know. And then you go, "nicotine and Limbaugh and not addictive" and then you'll find maybe a newspaper article written about it.

Rush Limbaugh
The overall question about research and working hard and acquiring knowledge, really that's what you're doing. If you have a thirst to learn, you have to do research. That's, in a way, what education is and what learning is. There's no such thing as acquiring additional knowledge above and beyond where you are without doing research. And the key ingredient to it is wanting to do it. The key ingredient is being jazzed when you succeeded at finding what you're looking for.

Chip Bayers
There's very little difference between what I did in school in terms of having to structure a term paper, or structure an essay, and what I have to do here as a magazine writer. It all comes back to fundamentals. I have to go out, I have to do my reporting. Or in the case of my student days, I had to go out and do my research. I had to support that reporting or support that research, I couldn't, I can't use just one source for something, I have to have multiple sources, it's better, in my case as a reporter to have multiple people backing up an idea, or multiple, multiple documents supporting a point. I've got to argue that point effectively, and I've got to link all of those ideas together in a kind of flow that makes a clear and convincing argument to a reader.

John Lovas
Most freshmen English courses somewhere require a research paper and it's sort of interesting you know why is that so. Well, the assumption is, is that any college student who is going to get a degree is at some point going to study a subject in greater depth. Eventually, you may even try to pursue a field to such a depth that you could try to make discoveries in that field. And, so much of what you're taught are…what the system is. How to locate that material and read it. How to take the key ideas out of it and paraphrase it. All of these pieces of work are related to the idea that you would study some subject more intensively than you normally would and be able to demonstrate the results of that study.