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.