Incorporating Research

The first essay that I read, "No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch," by Ann Hodgman, had a definite focus on the narrator's experience of eating dog food for a week rather than what research has to say about dog food in general.  The limited research that was incorporated didn't come from scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles, as one might expect from a research paper, but instead came from more personally accessible sources, which seemed to work well for this style of essay.  The first real source to make an appearance is a interview that she has conducted herself with a Purina spokesperson.  She used it as a way to answer her own questions about what was going on with the dog food she was consuming and to clarify packaging labels.  I thought the way that she incorporated the research was effective, because of merely stating the interviewee's responses, she wrote about the information by describing the experience of hearing that information herself, if that makes sense.  If you count her reading the packaging labels themselves as research, she incorporated those details in a similar fashion, which ultimately allows the essay to maintain its casual tone.

The research in Brian Doyle's "Joyan Voladoras" is even more subtle.  Perhaps it is because there are no quotation marks to signify that the narrator is pulling information from elsewhere and no parenthetical citations or signal phrases to give credit to any outside sources (which I'm wondering how he got away with this), but if I wasn't specifically looking for research incorporation, I might have missed it and noticed only the narrator's stream of consciousness.  However, the majority of the essay is research, and nearly none of it is stream of consciousness.  As a reader, I feel like the narrator knew all of these things about hearts and hummingbird anatomy off the top of his head because it was so fluidly incorporated into everything else he was saying, but as an academic writer, I'm concerned because I'm fairly certain that a normal human being doesn't just know all of that without conducting research on it first.  In conclusion,  I'm not entirely sure if this is a fault of a strength of this essay...