Course Reflection

During this fall semester I have seen an evolution throughout my writing. In the beginning of the semester when I learned that we would be doing research papers, I had an idea to tackle whether nature or nurture aspects were responsible for college depression. As the semester went on, I also realized how difficult it was to attain the information that is pertinent to this topic. It wasn’t until I had my proposal conference with Professor Longhany, which we determined how to still research what was of interest to me while being more realistic. I really appreciated how Professor Longhany sat with me, and broke apart my entire idea and helped me to form a better one. This was, of course, the most helpful critique I could have asked for in regards to forming the topic.  

What really assisted with the process was the realization of the discourse community I purely focused on, the student body of UCF. After determining this, I was then able to establish a more functional research question. Which led “The Causes of Antisocial Behavior in the Life of a College Student” to be the new topic. I then created a new research proposal and brought that in during office hours. After our topics were established, we worked on our interpretive summaries. I really enjoyed this because it enforced us to go into depth within our sources. Although this required us to go into depth with only one source, it really allowed me to decide whether to keep or eliminate the sources I had found previously.

Next we worked on our annotated bibliographies, and this enabled, for the first time, to really analyze all sources I had access to. I really tried to take full advantage of all of the databases I could. During this process, I really found out how imperative finding reliable sources were. Once I had all of my sources and had written summaries for them, I had gained a better understanding for my overall topic. This was evident to me after I had received the graded work back, and received a good score.

The intertexual map was something I had difficulty with in the beginning. I was unsure how to relate all of the data I had gathered, but once we created sections and categorized our data it became simpler. This assignment really enabled me to incorporate all of the information used to support my topic, while not feeling like I was straying off topic excessively. Before this class, I had never learned how to properly incorporate different sources into similar ideas and this was a great skill to have developed.

Finally was the literature review assignment. This assignment was the one I struggled with the most. When I first began, I was trying to merge information together to get a point across. After handing in this draft, although I had created a few during this time, I realized that this was not a functional way to go about this. My next attempt definitely went in another direction, but this time I hadn’t organized my information as clearly as it could have been done. I was unaware of this until I had gone into office hours and Professor Longhany and I had torn apart the first 4 pages of my paper. It was pointed out that the ideas provided were still not clearly organized and that I was present source after source rather than ideas.  Upon receiving these critiques, I began working on another copy and then was unable to bring in a new copy of my final literature review to office hours but it is posted on my blog. While working on this copy, the final copy, I was able to present ideas rather than sources and I eliminated disorganized information. Once I was able to achieve this, I had felt so accomplished.

Throughout this entire class I have really come to see how my styles in writing have evolved. Before this class I had never created annotated bibliographies or interpretive summaries, and the benefit of creating them is great. During the course of this class, I believe I have achieved outcome one. I accomplished this by identifying a discourse community within my topic. This discourse community was the student body of UCF, although it is made up of a variety of different people, these are all students with the similar goal to enhance their lives and futures with education. The next result I had reached was outcome 3. This was achieved throughout the process of the entire research paper, but most evidently supported with my interpretive summary and annotated bibliography. Through these pieces of work, I really incorporated all of the different sources I had found and understood how to relate all of the information gathered. Lastly, I reached outcome five. This was achieved through all of the resubmissions of my assignments. Overall this class has really allowed me to evolve as a student and has taught me how to use the collaboration of my sources to really enhance a research paper and my final work.