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.

Journal 3

Last weekend I skimmed Chapter 4&5. The "draft a preliminary thesis statement" part caught my special attention because I used to have problems with coming up with a good thesis. My previous essays were often lacking in a thesis clear enough to present my ideas. With this strategy, now I can basically understand how to make the thesis statement as accurate as possible by selecting one from several responses to my research question. Other parts about reading critically and different points to focus on when evaluating sources are also useful.

I am thinking about changing my topic because none of the sources I found for it is closely related, which is frustrating.

Jan 21, 2010 Journal 2

Before today's class, I did some brief reading of chapter1,2&3, which mainly talked about what we did in the class--coming up with a topic and doing some research.
In our group, we first did some brainstorming on our own, followed by a discussion. A bunch of ideas came up. My topic idea is about Internet corporations. I saw the news in WSJ that Google is planning to pull out of its Chinese market. Then a question that has been discussed a lot came to me: the similar situation has happened to not only google, but many other internet corporations, such as ebay, MSN, and so on. Why so many Internet corporations achieve world-wide success except in China? I think there are many reasons for it, including advertising strategies, self-positioning and lots of stuff. That is what I am going to do further research about.

Jan 19,2010 Journal 1

Today we talked about the syllabus in class. The syllabus is pretty clear about the course content, grading and every other thing we need to know about ENG104. There is something that my ENG103 class last semester did not include-- we are required to meet with the teacher individually twice during the semester, which might be a good help for me to sharpen my writing skills.

Last time we wrote a bibliography using the information provided in Chapter 20 of the textbook. Using MLA style is a kind of work that calls for carefulness and patience. There is still a lot for me to learn in the future.