Today’s Plan:
- Conference Sign Up / Reminder
- Writing Center Reminder
- Research Synthesis
- Play Your Game / Gather Your Data
- Rubric Reviewing Past Papers
- Homework
Conference Sign Up / Reminder
Remember that we are NOT meeting for class next week; I will be meeting with each of you for 20 minutes to discuss your paper progress and provide feedback. Make sure you sign up for a conference.
So far, only 4 people have signed up for a conference. The conference represents a week’s worth of class and labor, and I will weigh it appropriately in Canvas.
Note that there is an assignment to turn your work into Canvas, preferably 24 hours before your conference so that I have time to read it *before* we meet.
Writing Center Reminder
Another reminder: the syllabus rewards you for doing extra-labor. This includes bringing drafts of papers to the writing lab. I will give you extra points for bringing a draft of this project to the Writing Center even if you also visited it during project 1. More visits is good! They can help you plan out your paper, write out your methodology section, or brainstorm ideas for your discussion section.
In particular, remember the layout of the final paper:
- Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Poses the research questions clearly. Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions.
- Literature Review: This reviews previous research on your topic. As I’ll show below, there’s a lot of ways to “group” this research; you should organize this section around ideas, not around individual articles: that is, make sure your paragraphs open with a strong topic sentence that makes a claim about what/how researchers/scholars are discussing (something). Then group and discuss which scholars are doing that work (and how they are doing it–brief descriptions of methods, findings, and discussion, concise synthesis of your research annotations). See below for more information.
- Methodology: This section generally needs to do 3-4 things (in our case, most of you will only do two of them). I will go over these below.
- Data / Findings / Discussion: Sometimes you will see these sections separated–especially in the hard sciences where your data can be presented as numbers, graphs, and tables. Some of you are working on papers that involve this kind of research (Jade, Ainsley, Chris). In these papers, you will see one section for Data (or Findings) and another section for Discussion, in which you compare your findings to previous studies in the literature review (noting what agrees and what disagrees with previous findings), you highlight and explain unexpected findings, and you suggest the impact of these findings (what they mean for the field, or what changes they suggest are necessary to our world–note that sometimes this happens in the conclusion).
- Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).
Play Your Game / Gather Your Data
There’s not too much to explain here: this week is dedicated to playing your game and/or conducting your research. Whatever you do, please submit some work to Canvas by Saturday the 13th at midnight to the assignment “Week 12: Gaming Journal / Primary Research Methodology and Data.”
Reviewing the Rubric and Assessing Some Papers
Let me review a few of my most fundamental pedagogical assumptions:
- Writing is not natural (abstract)
- Writing is really hard (audience?)
- Every writing situation is (somewhat) unique and thus (somewhat) disorienting
- Every writing instructor has specific expectations (academic writing is kind of the worst of all writing)
- Learning to write well requires we develop the capacity to move beyond ourselves and imagine how a range of others might receive our words
- Writing cannot be taught
- Writing can be learned
- One of the best ways you can learn to write is by examining the structure and organization used by other writers (in the words of Robert Pinsky, to learn to read like a good chef eats)
- My approach to this examination involves “grade norming,” asking you to assess papers written by other students. The goal is to familiarize you with a wide range of principles that I (and a lot of other instructors, whether explicitly or implicitly) will use to evaluate your work. Hypothesis: the better you get at evaluating other people’s writing, the better you will be at evaluating and revising your own writing before you turn it in
