Hi everyone! First, make sure you follow me so that I can easily find you to grade your work.
The purpose of this blog assignment is to get you thinking and writing about your work, just like academic writers do. Being reflective and giving yourself time to ask helpful questions and figure out the answers is crucial to being successful in writing, especially in research-based writing. As our textbook says, Good writing comes from returning to your ideas on your own and with your classmates, reconsidering them, and revising them as your thinking develops. This is not something you can do with any specificity unless you have written down your ideas (12).
Your audience is me, your peers, and yourself of course. I want to see your train of thought and help you ask the right questions. Your peers might read your blog for inspiration or direction, and you might do the same of your peers' blogs. And of course, writing this blog will help you better engage with and understand your research.
For your first blog post assignment (due W 2/8 for all classes), I'd like you to write about how your research is going. Please address the following in your post:
-What is your research question/inquiry question?
-Why did you settle on this question? What interests you about the topic? Explain.
-How is your question/topic timely? Why is it important to address this topic? Why should people care about it?
-What do you expect to find in your research? What preliminary research have you done that makes you expect this?
-Are you coming across scholars w/ different answers to your question, or different views of your topic? (If you're NOT and people seem to all agree, then your research question and topic probably aren't worth pursuing, right?) Explain what these answers/views are that you are finding. (Remember that our textbook warns us of the dangers of binary thinking on pg. 6.)What do you think about the different viewpoints? Where do you stand on the issue, and do you think your mind could change the further you get into this semester-long inquiry?
-Any questions or concerns you'd like to address?
