- Tell the reader what you intend for the research essay to do for its readers. For this research essay, my intention is to provide a deeper explanation on exactly what the Humane Society is, and the importance of it. I want my readers to understand that doing little things, taking near to no work can cause a great impact on a specific community.
- Describe its purpose(s) and the effect(s) you want it to have on the readers. Say who you think the readers are. I feel like my readers could vary from teens to college students and even to adults. My purpose is to make those people aware of how common it is that animals are in danger, and left with no home and food. The effect I want it to have on people is simply to be alert. I want these people to know there are indeed things they can do.
- Describe your process of working on the essay. First, I had to come up with a community that was important to me so that I had prior information to use when writing this essay. After I chose my community, I had to gain knowledge on the more specific parts of this community and get a feel for actual statistics. Once I felt I had gained the proper amount of knowledge, I was then able to go ahead and write my paper.
- What kind of planning did you do? I would say that the planning I really did was choosing a community I felt comfortable talking on. Once I had chosen my community, I then did my actual research.
- What steps did you go through, what changes did you make along the way, what decisions did you face, and how did you make the decisions? The changes I made along the way were what community I decided I was going to research. I had looked for numerous communities to research, yet not alot stood out to me, and I felt that since I was not passionate about them, my essay would not be strong.
- How did comments from your peers, in peer workshop, help you? How did any class activities on style, editing, etc., help you? The comments from my peers were the most beneficial when it came to shaping my Final draft. I felt my rough draft was not my full potential, so seeing the helpful comments my peers gave to me pushed me to do better and fix things I hadn’t noticed needed work.
February 2021
| Title of Article + Proper MLA Citation for Works Cited page | Driscoll. “Observations, Surveys, and Interviews.” Definitions and Overview, readings on writing. Volume 1, 2011, 23. |
| Summarize the article — include your reaction, thoughts, anything to help you remember its claims. 100 to 150 words | In Driscolls article, she discusses and gives tips on how to obtain information for a research project, in this article she gives beneficial tips to improve our research, and make it ethical. She states that it is extremely important to use primary sources in order to correctly write a research paper. She feels that a primary source will make ones paper more ethical. She really gave a narrowed description on how to conduct a proper research paper. |
| Define new terms and concepts by quoting or paraphrasing the original author. | primary research, survey, ethics, hypothesis, data collection. |
| How does this reading connect to other articles from class and/or your own research?
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I feel that this article related to prior articles in that we are talking about how to properly write an essay. Other essays have told us about good backbones on an essay, but this one told us how to write it while other articles have narrowed down more on something like credible sources. |
| Based on the reading, craft one question to act as a springboard for class discussion. | What is the most important step on gathering research for an essay? |
Critical Thinking Reflection #1
- How did you decide what information was most important for the draft? It was quite easy to pick out what was and wasn’t important when forming this draft. There is not alot of information to obtain, yet the only thing you could do is go deeper in the criteria.
- Why did you decide to “leave out” certain information? How did you make these rhetorical decisions? Like stated above, there was not THAT much information to it, so I tried to include everything I could do research on rather than leaving things out.
- What were the steps for your research in this draft? I had to come up with what I wanted to research, how I was going to get information on it, get credible sources, and then proceed to gather the information.
- What assumptions/biases did you bring to the research? How did you work to contextualize and check these assumptions/biases? The only assumptions that I made were that the Humane Society was able to provide the majority of their animals with homes, so in order to make sure this was a fact, I had to look on their website/ websites to make sure that what I was assuming was correct.
- How did you work with facts, observations, and so on, in order to form an argument? I had to find credible sources that provided my information, and then provide examples on why I thought this was an important topic.
- What information are you still searching for to help your research? To help my research, I am still looking for more statistic information on the Humane Society. I want more information on not how many animals are rescued but how quickly and how well these animals are kept after being adopted, I would also like to know how well each Humane Society does compared to other locations.
Warrington, Kovalyova, King Reading Journal
| Title of Article + Proper MLA Citation for Works Cited page | Warrington, Kovalyova, and King “Assessing Source Credibility for Crafting
a Well-Informed Argument.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3, |
| Summarize the article — include your reaction, thoughts, anything to help you remember its claims. 100 to 150 words | This article was one that I found not only interesting, yet I found it to be helpful for what I need to know now, and in the future. To sum up this article, we were given tips and examples on how to know when a source is or is not credible. Throughout Writing classes, we are assigned quite often research projects, which then needs you to be able to find sources, which need to be credible. This article gave us online examples of websites to determine if they were credible or not. The Author used an animal shelter as an example, and walked us through how to determine the credibility. This article also gave me a more broad idea on why it is so important to make sure that your sources are credible. I think it is so important because if you are trying to inform someone on a topic and your research is not true, this could lead to upset readers. |
| Define new terms and concepts by quoting or paraphrasing the original author. | “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.” |
| How does this reading connect to other articles from class and/or your own research?
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This reading connects to our Writing class in general, it has always been important to be able to locate what is credible and what is not when forming an essay, and this provided a deeper understanding of determining what is and isnt credible. |
| Based on the reading, craft one question to act as a springboard for class discussion. | How do you know when a source is credible or not? |