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| Piolle, Guillaume. "Loch Alsh- Reflection" 8/7/09 via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. |
- What challenges did you face during the Quick Reference Guide project and how did you deal with them?
- The most challenging thing was organizing my time effectively. It was difficult to find time to research and revise multiple times. Once I did find time, it was hard to stay focused because I felt that I had been away from my draft for so long that I had lost my train of thought.
- What successes did you experience on the project and how did they happen?
- I feel like my overall topic finding was a success. With Neuroscience, it can be somewhat difficult to find a controversy, or at least that's what I found. However, when I looked it up this seemed to be one of the few truly Neuroscience debates happening, which just so happened to begin last year!
- What kinds of arguments, rhetorical strategies, design choices and writing practices did you find the most effective for your project? Why?
- I found that using hyperlinks were very helpful. At first, I was citing my quotes in APA. With APA, the in-text citations really take away from the quote instead of flowing seamlessly through them. Once I found out that hyperlinks were the best way to go, my quotes fit perfectly into my paragraphs.
- What kinds of arguments, rhetorical strategies, design choices and writing practices did you find were not effective for your project? Why?
- I found that listing any sort of data was not effective. While it would have worked, there were no images of graphs or data that were free to use (copyright-wise). I feel that I listed enough evidence within the text itself, however.
- How was the writing process for this project similar to other school writing experiences you’ve had in the past?
- It was similar in the way the general process was. First, we must think about a question, then do research and then find quotes. Finally, we write the paper including our opinion.
- How was the writing process for this project different from other school writing experiences you’ve had in the past?
- It was actually very different. The steps leading up to the final project were much more intensive and it took a lot of work to finally get the QRG finished. With better time management, I feel that this process actually might be better to work through to lead to a better produce. Also, it was strange looking through social media sourced because I have never done that before in a writing project!
- Would any of the skills you practiced for this project be useful in your other coursework? Why or why not?
- Yes! I feel that the summaries we had to complete would be helpful for almost every course. For example, in Chemistry, we can use these types of short, quick summaries to explain how we found the answer to a problem. Also within most of the other sciences we will probably end up following the same intensive processes.
Reflection:
After reading the reflections by Clay and Sam, I found that my classmates have similar feelings like I do toward this project.
First, we all understand that this is not the last time we will be using technology, such as a blog or online source, to write a project. Second, we were all sort of in the dark as to what a Quick Reference Guide exactly was. I think we have all seen them around, but never knew the exact name or never noticed the conventions for it.
I definitely agree with a lot of things that you said in this post! When you addressed how crucial time management and the necessity of a good revision process I felt reassured about my own experiences during this project. I also wrote in APA style initially, and can relate to your feelings that a typical citation somewhat hinders the flow of one's writing.
ReplyDeleteI thought that your comment about putting data into the work was ineffective. This sounds counter intuitive, but what you said makes sense. I had a similar issue in that most relevant pictures to my topics were copyrighted, but they weren't as important as data. That's a really interesting limit as far as QRG's though. We haven't gone over what it would take to get access to those images, but it's likely that it would be way overboard for something like this.
ReplyDeleteBreanna, my area of study for this project was neuroscience as well, so I totally understand the struggle of finding a specific topic that was interesting enough to focus on. Time management was also an issue for me. I still struggle with it, and will most likely continue to struggle with it for the foreseeable future, so at least you know you're not alone.. I think it was particularly interesting how you addressed the importance of hyperlinking for this genre of writing. I think it's overlooked sometimes, but it's honestly the most useful tool.
ReplyDelete