Response Week 3 Oliver

Some chapters I have a really hard time with this reading because 90% of it is things that have been hammered into me already in undergraduate. While this makes me grateful to have already gone through the IRB approval process and thus have experience with a lot of this, it does make paying attention for new information difficult. For this section, I'm focusing primarily on the Purpose Statement chapter due to my interest in grant-writing, as a large portion of grant-writing is explaining why performing some service or research is important. It is also not uncommon for me to have issues narrowing down and being specific as to my goal in writing a paper or performing a study.

I appreciate the script provided on page 114. While I would never copy the script into a paper or proposal, it does force you to think in a specific, helpful way, channeling your thoughts into a concise statement. The same applies for the examples given. Before having this text, I would frequently get on JSTOR and search for similar papers in order to see the flow and arrangement other academics use. This can replace some of that, to a degree. One new thing I noticed was how prominently many examples featured their disclaimers/researcher biases, which I wouldn't have thought to do. My instinct would've been to include it towards the end, or possibly in the introduction.

I used the writing exercise at the end of the chapter for a paper I'm currently working on for another class. It's a qualitative study, so I used the first exercise, which is to fill out the script featured on page 114:

The purpose of this case study was to describe the rhetorical practices of the website reddit.com. At this stage in the research, the rhetorical practices are being primarily compared with the works of Aristotle, Anonymous (Rhetorica Ad Herennium), and Anonymous (Principles of Letter-Writing) to ground the analysis in traditional rhetorical discussion.

In the beginning of the next chapter (Research Questions and Hypotheses), I had a brief moment of panic because the first section states “In a qualitative study, inquirers state research questions, not objectives....” My specific introduction and study does not ask questions, and instead states exploratory objectives, which is expressly advised against by this chapter. However, it seems to me that my objectives can easily be reworked into questions, as indeed most objectives or hypotheses could, so this appears to be semantic quibble. I think in rigorous fields this might be an issue, however based on the reading I have done in my primary fields of interest (contemporary literary studies, contemporary rhetorical studies, and contemporary gifted education studies) there is a little more fluidity in paper writing than this book indicates.

Finally, I liked the exercise given at the end of this chapter, which suggests writing one or two central questions followed by five or seven subquestions. While the exact numbers are irrelevant, I think this kind of idea organization is very helpful in paper writing, and I intend to implement this strategy in future teaching / writing center tutoring.