Week 7:

• Dates: Wednesday, 10/16 and Monday, 10/21
• Meeting Info: Each week, I will post an agenda that will outline the week’s work. It will include instructions for you and links to readings, discussion questions, and other work.  We will work on developing community both in our classroom and in our online written community.  

Objectives

• To find topics for our Project 2 research
• To narrow our topics into research questions
• To draft our introductions
• To begin finding sources for Project 2

To Do Before Week 7

Just in case you haven’t already, please:

• Catch up on any readings or discussions you’ve missed following Project 1–you can review the Weekly Class Agendas to see what we covered. If you haven’t yet submitted Project 1: Education Narrative and the cover letter (paper copy distributed in class), please reach out to me to discuss a plan.

To-Do This Week

Wednesday, 10/16

Texts:

• Article: “Millions of Jobs of a Different Collar” by Steven Greenhouse
• Video: “Writing an Annotated Bibliography” (City Tech Library)
• Reading/Writing Resource Essay:  “Annotated Bibliography Breakdown” (Purdue OWL)
• Reading/Writing Resource Presentation “What Is Research?” by Prof. Carrie Hall
• Reading/Writing Resource: City Tech Library’s Guide to Developing a Research Question to help you narrow down and finalize your research question

Writing:

• Discussion about what sparks our interest

In Class:

• “What Is Research?” by Prof. Carrie Hall
• What is inquiry-based research? “open-ended question motivated by curiosity, whose goal is not to prove anything, but to discover salient ideas”–from “Research Starts With a Thesis Statement” by Emily Wierszewski, 233
• Freewriting, brainstorming, collaborating about our ideas for research topics
  • What’s a topic that you want to think about more, such as big issues in your field, or what you’re passionate about? Brainstorm about it for a few minutes on your page
  • on your page: What do you know about the topic?
  • What do you want to know about the topic? what questions do you have?
  • Research: take these 5 minutes to do some research to answer a question you have or to look into something you want to know more about.
  • sayback: what topics did we choose and what did we learn?
• Drafting an introduction
  • Introduce your research topic and question.
  • Explain how or why you got interested in your question.
  • Explain what you already know as a foundation for your research.
  • Explain what you expect to find in your research (a hypothesis).
  • Write this in paragraph format (1-3 paragraphs, approximately 300 words)
• Developing research questions
  • start with a topic and shape it into a question that helps you get into the field you want to research
  • Why-questions, How-questions. What do you already know, and what do you want to know more about?
• Search terms
  • try doing a google search and see what you get!
  • what new search terms can you find that will fine-tune your search to help you get better results?

Monday 10/21

Texts:

• Rhetoric Essay: “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis” by Laura Bolin Carroll (first half)
• Video: “Writing an Annotated Bibliography” (City Tech Library)
• Reading/Writing Resource Essay:  “Annotated Bibliography Breakdown” (Purdue OWL)
• Reading/Writing Resource: “Annotated Bibliography” (Cornell University)
• Read about research! Skim Alison C. Witte’s “Research Starts with Answers” in Bad Ideas About Writing, pp 226-230 (that’s the page numbers within the book–the page numbers in the actual file are a little different), paying attention to 228-229. (note that the title of the book, Bad Ideas About Writing, tells us that each of the chapter titles are themselves bad ideas about writing! But the content includes great ideas about writing!)
• Find one source to add to your annotated bibliography and read it–and bring it to class either digitally or printed

Writing:

• Begin drafting your first annotation; share it in our first-source discussion and bring it to class

In Class:

• Next steps:
  • Begin writing the introduction. This is where you write about why you are interested in the topic, how you found your way to it, what you want to get out of doing the research, etc.
  • Continue drafting the annotation for your first source
  • Find another source
  • Draft an annotation for your source
  • Continue to evaluate the sources you have chosen–do you need to replace any? What if you find better sources after you have written an annotation?
• What is an annotated bibliography?
  • what is a bibliography? why do we use them?
  • what is an annotation? why do we use them?
• Annotated Bibliography Resources:
  • Video: “Writing an Annotated Bibliography” (City Tech Library)
  • Reading/Writing Resource Essay:  “Annotated Bibliography Breakdown” (Purdue OWL)
  • Reading/Writing Resource: “Annotated Bibliography” (Cornell University)
• Reflective Annotated Bibliography Examples:
  • “Black Holes” by Hashim Khan
  • “Why Haven’t we Found a Cure for Diabetes?”  (uncredited)
  • “When a School is a Cemetery” by Sabina Uddin, in City Tech Writer
  • What do they do that we want to do? What do they leave out that we want to do? What do they do that we want to leave out?
    • explain what the topic is
    • explain the topic in detail
    • how they got interested
    • relating to our daily lives, pop culture, field-specific knowledge
    • what we know–both general and specific
    • what we expect to find –> hypothesis
    • how does it connect to your field/future job/etc
• Drafting an introduction
  • Introduce your research topic and question.
  • Explain how or why you got interested in your question.
  • Explain what you already know as a foundation for your research.
  • Explain what you expect to find in your research (a hypothesis).
  • Write this in paragraph format (1-3 paragraphs, approximately 300 words)
  • Add your draft as a comment in our Discussion on Project 2 Introductions
• How did we research?
  • If you haven’t started your research, begin by looking for one source
• What did we find?
• How do we write an annotation for our source?
  • If you found a source, begin writing or revising your annotation

Photo Credit: “WHERE IS YOUR PASSION” by Chris Lasher via Flickr under the license CC BY 2.0.