In-Class, Wed., Oct. 22nd: Hints for Research Essay

Today, we are having a WORKSHOP to google two more research essays, and create the other two entries for our Annotated Bibliography which are due this Friday, Oct. 24th, at class time.

I will email you when your entries are correct and approved, and this means you can copy and paste them in your Word document under "Annotated Bibliography" that we created this Monday (the one with the 12 headlines for the research essay components).

Remember to always have your Word document accessible (in an email to yourself), so we can continue to work on our research essays during the following two weeks!

We are not emailing out our surveys yet, since I haven't finished grading all of them yet. Only when I have returned and approved both your letter of introduction AND your graded survey, you can go ahead and email it out to the 20 emails of your audience that you should have collected by now. Put me in the cc: line, so I know your survey has been emailed out!!! I hope to have them all graded by this Friday, Oct. 24th.

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Here are a few HINTS about your Research Essays:

What I don't want to see in your papers: don't use the words

1) fact
2) truth
3) proof

!!!!!

This means, never say, "It is a fact that.... (AAE should be taught in high school, all college freshmen are bad at grammar, etc.)." Nothing ever is a fact; there are always different opinions, numbers, and debates; it might be a hypothesis, a perception, an observation, an appearance, etc.

Never say, "it is true that," "in truth,..." - we are in no position to decide what the higher truth is!

Never say "proof," such as "my results proved." We are not famous researchers who create proof that can overrule existing research - we are just a class gathering data from a limited pool and writing a paper about that. Our reliability/validity is not very high due to our limitations. You can say, "the outcome of this study was," "the results show that," "according to the results," "the findings were that," "It can be suggested that." But we are not going to prove anything to the world.

Also, never use personifications, such as "the research says" - the research cannot say anything; it is the author of a research paper who purports / claims / argues / maintains / states something. (!!!) Make sure you vary your verbs accordingly.

Further, remember to use academic voice, which means you have to write in passive. ("This study was conducted at.... participants were chosen among.... a survey was emailed to..... the following methods were applied... the results were compared to...."). Don't use the personal pronoun "I."

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