the Writing Center

I went to the writing center before turning in my final paper, and it was a very helpful experience. My tutor was nice and patient, she went through my paper very carefully, pointed out a number of small mistakes I made, and corrected them with a more accurate wording.

Many things she said was similar to my classmates' comments during peer review, but some of them are quite different. I thought it was because writing a research paper is subjective on some level, and people may have a variety of opinions on the same issue. Peer review is a good way to help you realize your mistakes and stuff you haven't thought of, but others' opinion does not have to be the best one. Sometimes you have to think it through and decide which idea is better and more reasonable.

research paper peer review

Today we did our last peer review in class. Everybody got to review more than one person's paper. I read two, one of them is relatively well written and the other is a less organized rough draft. But I did learn things from both of them, because there were already other people's notes on them. While I read the research paper, I also read the comments it got, from details like punctuation to main structure, and I found it very helpful to improve my own writing by reading them, because many of us had the similar mistakes.
Tomorrow I'm going to the writing center to get my paper revised. I hope I can get some more targeted advice.

final project presentation

This week in class I did my final project presentation. I made a powepoint slide show and talked about what I was writing in my essay. My topic is cell phone in modern society, and I didn't focus on the technology part, instead I made a summary of the influence cell phone brought us.

Personally, I think Pat's presentation today about alcoholism in college is very interesting. That's because young people are not allowed to drink alcohol before 21 in America, but there are no such rules in China, and yet alcohol seems to be a bigger problem among American college students. This may be an example of "good intentions bring bad results", and should remind people to reconsider the rationality of the prohibition of alcohol.

presentation

Today our group did the pecha-kucha presentation on food court field project.The presentation summarized the process of this project, included the observation, interview, and survey. The survey we conducted was not persuasive enough because we only sent it to the class, and very few people took it.The data may be more effective if we posted it somewhere else.

I guess I wasn't accurate about the timing , so before I could finish one slide, I already ran out of time. I hope the rest of the class will check the time needed for every slide and do better in the next class.

Field Work Group Project

In today's class we talked about the next project we're going to do. We will go out of class and observe and interview people at different places. Our group will do the observation at least twice at the LaFollette food court, to see what people are doing and write a reflective essay to interpret it. It is kind of hard to discover different things each person since people do similar things at the same place. It means I have to look for some fresh ideas to make the research more interesting.

Journal 5

In Tuesday's class meeting,I turned in my topic proposal.A week ago during the conference with my teacher, she gave me some helpful advice on making my proposal more specific and adding more aspects into the "psychological effect" part.I made several changes after that, which I think may help make my prosposal more complete.
We did a bibliography of online sources in class. There was a very tricky one-- a work on a website,which took us quite sometime to figure out.Mastering MLA style is harder than I thought.I should spend more time on it this semester.

Peer Review

For today's peer review, I wrote a 3-page proposal about my new topic--cell phone. It is commonly seen in people's daily lives, and all of us are familiar with its functions and advantages, so I think it'll be relatively easy for me to think comprehensively about it.

I peer reviewed the topic proposal that a girl in our group wrote. She wants to talk about the sex trafficking issue, which sounds chanllenging to me. But she did a very good job presenting her ideas about what to do with her topic, including interviewing people and other things. I think it will be a powerful essay if she deeply delve into her ideas.