Initial Research: Project 1

One of the most important parts of researching any topic is deciding what exactly you'll research.  For this, you'll want to start with an open-ended approach, and then use your initial research to narrow-down your topic and your genre.

Project Workshops: Feedback for Writing Research

As writers, we can only truly succeed if we are able to revise our writing to meet the needs and expectations of our readers.  The workshop provides three important experiences to help you do this better:

1. Reading the work by your peers will help you better understand how different works of writing connect with audiences (such as yourself.)
2. Providing Feedback for your classmates helps you better articulate the writing process.
3. Receiving Feedback from your peers will provide new perspectives to help you revise your current project.

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Trial By Fury: CHAT and Amanda Knox

In Douglas Preston's Trial By Fury, we see an example that's very close to the types of writing research I'm expecting you to do for your projects.  Although Preston doesn't directly reference Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, his work shows the interplay between social media genres such as websites and Wikipedia and the social factors surrounding the writing.  For our discussion, we want to look at the relationships he's found the ways in which he's organized these into a coherent narrative.

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Research Quotes: Organizing Information

One of the keys to good research is collecting large quantities of information, and then organizing that information into a coherent narrative that others can understand.
Requirements:

1. Direct quotes have quotation marks, indirect quotes (paraphrasing) won't.
2. Each quote must have the author's last name listed (following MLA in-text citation)
3. I encourage you to give a line or two of your personal thoughts about the quote, but this is not required.  (Something like "I like this quote because..." or "This indicates that..."
4. For each quote, include 1-3 keywords (think hashtags).  Something like "genre convention...." or "CHAT term..."

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Quick Note: If this feels like busy work, you’re doing it wrong. Seriously. Write down the weirdest / most interesting quotes you find. Don’t worry about how they’ll fit. That’s what the outline is for.

Project 1 Proposal

The discussion for Project 1 is very open. There's no specific research component required - I'm mostly checking to see that you know the difference between writing research and content research in terms of how you'll approach you project. So describe the writing genre you want to research for Project 1, and I'll post replies to let you know if you're on the right track.

Overall: Genre, Topic, Details
The main things I'm looking for are that

1. You've identified a genre of writing you'd like to study.
2. You can talk about the topic where you've seen this genre and why that's important to you.
3. You're able to give some details about how you'd research the genre.

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Twitter, Trayvon Martin, and Writing Research

This week, we have a few key goals toward developing your skills as writing researchers. In this discussion about Trayvon Martin, I'm looking for each of you to develop three skills:

1. Identify genre conventions (in this case, of Twitter and Mass Media)
2. Correlate these genre conventions with CHAT
3. Select relevant quotes from the articles to support your points

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