Tips for your research papers

Hi folks–it was so great to hear about your projects in class these past few days.  Thanks for being willing to share your ideas, and extra-special props to those of you who thought outside the box!

All of you are creating new knowledge through these projects, which is wonderful, but it’s also important to remember that your research was, of necessity, limited in scope (there’s only so much you can do in a semester).  So, don’t feel obliged to make huge claims based on your data–you’ll want to keep your claims modest, defensible, and contextualized.

It’s also appropriate to analyze your methods as you write this up.  What flaws in your methods did you discover during the process?  (No instrument is ever perfect.)  What were the limitations?  If you had human participants, in what ways were or weren’t they a representative sample?  None of this prevents you from making reasonable claims, but you need to acknowledge these limitations as you decide what claims you do want to make.

Please make sure to submit your final drafts to Blackboard by 11:59 pm on Wednesday, May 4 (as usual, no late work accepted without prior arrangements).

Good luck with this and all your end-of-semester work!

Assignments for week of April 4

Ok folks: here’s the plan for next week and a bit about upcoming assignments.

For Tuesday, 4/5:

• Submit your rough draft to Blackboard
• Please get feedback on your draft from at least 1 other person on Tuesday.  I encourage you to meet in person, since you all know you are available during class time on Tuesday, but if you’d rather meet electronically, you can.  Just make sure to get it done in a timely fashion.
• Write a brief blog post that explains a) what you discussed and what kinds of feedback you received, and b) what your plans are for addressing that feedback and moving closer to the final draft.

For Thursday, 4/7:

• Read the introduction through Interchapter 1 of Harry Denny’s Facing the Center and post your response in the Discussion Board on Blackboard.  I’m not going to require separate responses to each other this time, but you should read the existing responses before you post your own comment and make connections/build off of each others’ thoughts when appropriate.

For Tuesday, 4/12:

• Read the chapter you chose today in class: either “Facing Race and Ethnicity” or “Facing Class” and the interchapter that goes with it.  Be ready to teach it to your classmates during class.

Thoughts about your research project:

• Keep in mind that you must have your data collected in time to be able to present it creatively to the class in the form of a remix on 4/21, 4/26, or 4/28.  So you can have the remix in mind as you proceed, I’ll describe it a bit here; we’ll sign up for dates and discuss questions you have about this assignment on 4/12.
• The remix should take what you’ve discovered through your research project and present it in a new genre (something other than the traditional academic essay you are also working on).  A research poster counts as a remix, as does a multimedia presentation of your findings, but you may get more creative if you like.  You can create a flyer or brochure, a short video, a scrapbook…really, any medium that you can make a case for is fine, as long as you can articulate the audience for it and why it is an effective way to reach that audience.

Other assignments:

• If you haven’t turned in your annotated bibliography yet, it’s not too late.  This is an assignment designed to help you, so getting it in late is far better than not at all.
• Don’t forget your blog posts!  While I prefer that you complete them before our class discussions, better late than never–you can certainly go back and complete ones you’ve missed.

Thanks for reading all of this, and I’ll see you in a week and a half.

Schedule updates

Folks,

I’d like to shift our schedule around a bit to give you the time you need to get things done well.

• Let’s make the due date for the annotated bibliography Thursday, 3/17.  Please bring any questions you have about this assignment to class on Tuesday, and please submit the bibliographies on Blackboard.
• The UW-Madison Writing Center site has good info about annotated bibliographies: http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/AnnotatedBibliography.html.  If you click through the links there, I’d say that you should strive for a “Combination” bibliography with the “Complete Sentences” writing style. That is, someone should be able to read your bibliography and get a good sense of the arguments of the sources you are citing and your take on them.
• Don’t worry about a blog post for next week; just focus on a) doing the readings and b) getting your annotated bibliography done for Thursday.
• While we’re talking about blogs: from here on out, please make sure to post once about The Everyday Writing Center and once about Facing The Center, and then we can call it a day, since you will be deep into the research paper writing/remixing process.
• To reiterate what I said at the end of class: please make sure to revisit Grimm’s “The Regulatory Role of the Writing Center” (in our Week 5 readings) for Tuesday, as well as reading the Wilson and Young essays.

Thanks for your flexibility and all your thoughtful responses to our readings!

Generating Research Questions

Since I’m asking you all to develop research questions for your proposals, I wanted to share a couple of online resources that might be helpful as you try to come up with your questions:

Bedford–How to Develop a Research Question
GCU–Writing a Good Research Question

We’ll talk more about this on Thursday.  Happy brainstorming!

IRB training

Hi folks–if you are considering going for IRB approval of your research project so you can get your ideas out into the world, you’ll need to complete the training.  A link to CITI training (IRB training) is available here: http://research.unl.edu/researchresponsibility/required-and-optional-training/.

Research resources

Here are some resources both for your brief presentation of an article and as you begin searching for information on your research topic:

• The Writing Center Journal (available in the library)
• WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship (link to archives)
• Praxis: A Writing Center Journal
• Any of the sources Ianetta and Fitzgerald mention in the chapters you’ve read of The Oxford Guide for Peer Tutors (Young Scholars in Writing, etc.)
• To search more generally in writing studies scholarship: CompPile

Weekly blog posts

Hi folks.  Thanks very much to those of you who have commented/emailed me your links.  I’ve added the ones I’ve received so far (if I missed yours, please let me know!).

I rethought my answer to the question about what you should write about in your blog posts.  I would say that you can, but do not have to respond to all the readings from a given day (Tuesday and/or Thursday each week).  Just make sure to write a response of a reasonable length to at least one reading per week: 300-600 words, approximately.  Including specific quotations is highly recommended; links to other relevant material are great.

Welcome to English 4/880!

This is the main course blog for English 4/880, the Writing Center Theory and Practice course.  Blog post prompts and links to individual blogs will find a home here.