9.25 more on analysis and creating a research plan

Analysis.  You are making great progress on developing the basic moves and terminology you will use in writing analytic research for writing studies!   Good work.  The first part of today's class was about giving you a particular example of how one student (me) wrote her blog post for Blog 6.  We read the sample analysis (posted to the right) and talked about the strengths and weaknesses of the post.  First we identified what the Blog post required the writer to do, then you analyzed the post for whether and how it met the requests  made by the prompt.  You did a great job on this.  This class pretty much agreed on the author's strengths (presenting a rich, detailed list of names for what was happening in literacy narrative 3, posing some connections between what was going on in the literacy narrative and the categories she developed) and her weaknesses (the organization was difficult to follow until you figured it out, didn't set up the focus at the beginning) - and we discussed how the multiple questions posed at the end were in some ways a strength (gave the researcher lots of things to think about - lots of places to go with her research) and in some ways a weakness (didn't do what the prompt requested).

So good job on this.  You asked if you could go back and re-do your last blog - and of course I said yes.  I will be looking at blogs after Thursday - and have feedback for you before the end of the weekend.  You can re-do your post in one of several ways: re-write & re-post; add to the original; add comments about what you would do differently in a different colored font.  I will give points for the revised version taken together with the original.  Also - I suggested that if there are parts of analysis that you are still not understanding - write questions - and I will give you answers as part of your feedback.

Finding your focus for your research project.  We spent the next part of class doing some listing/freewriting for you to think about big ideas/general directions for your research project. You have your writing from class - and hopefully you will keep adding to it.

We then opened up the worksheet for developing a research plan - and talked a little about how to move from a broad idea (something about how technology is changing the way we write) to something "do-able" in terms of the research project for this course.

We talked through the first three steps - and your blog post for Thursday is to get started with doing some of the writing under these points.

Some things to think about as you narrow down your question:

• the focus has to connect to literacy studies (I can help with this angle - but talk to me early rather than later if you are worried about your connection)
• your paper will be 5-7 pages long (so your question needs a clear, tight focus)
• you will need to connect your data to what other researchers have written about your question (so you will need to be able to find research papers in writing studies relevant to your topic - again - I will help with this)
• you will need to collect observational data on your topic (or else clear with me that it will be a library project)

For next class:

Blog 6 (optional) revise/update in light of today's class discussion

Blog 7: do some writing to the points on the worksheet on developing a research question. You do not need to write to every point.  You do need to do sufficient writing to clearly identify a broad focus for your work.  The more you write into your idea - the more feedback I can give you.  

Read: Rhetoric of Teacher Comments on Student Writing  Robin Martin  This paper was written by a student researcher.  We will use it as an example of one kind of analysis that writing researchers do (it is not perfect - so you may see some things that you think should be done differently); and as a "model" for one way to write a research paper in writing studies.

Additional point:  The world is large enough and complicated enough  - and from a human perspective language flows through everything => so you should be able to choose something that truly interests you.  This is YOUR responsibility.  This project is a genuine opportunity to study something you are curious about.  Go for it.

Great class today - see you on Thursday.