Course Reflection

            Beginning this course, I did not expect to do as much writing as I ended up doing. I quickly realized that the amount of writing that I produced reflected the research topic that I chose. Writing my research paper for this class changed my entire writing style. I learned how to take ideas from past researchers and create my own ideas and questions. I also learned the importance of getting to know the conversation that has already been going on in an area of research. Finally, I spent most of my time making substantial revisions to my work, because making several drafts has become imperative to developing a well written paper.

            The second outcome is to engage in a meaningful, dynamic, and inquiry-based research process. I believe that I achieved this outcome in my Literature Review. I began my project by asking a simple question about the topic I wanted to research. I had initially wrote on the blog page an inquiry question that I thought to be well thought out. I received feedback from other students and after doing my own research for the literature review, I changed my research question. You can see the difference in my questions as I expanded my research:

How well, if at all, do documentaries and other forms of communication change peoples' actions and opinions related to the treatment of animals?

From Inquiry Questions post on blog

My purpose of research was to see how well people respond to a variation of advertising strategies related to animal rights.

From final draft of Literature Review

Not only did my understanding of the topic I was researching improve since the beginning of the semester, but I was also able to eventually use feedback from peer reviews and develop a better final paper.

            The third outcome is to read, analyze, and synthesize complex texts and incorporate multiple kinds of evidence purposefully in order to generate and support my writing. I chose my Intertextual Map and my Literature Review to demonstrate this. In my Intertextual Map, I wrote general statements that reflected common ideas from the research that I had done on animal rights. Underneath the statements, I listed article titles and specific ideas that each had that matched the general statement. This excerpt shows how I accomplished this:

1.      Animals are used to benefit humans

·         Reasonable Partiality and Animal Ethics (2005)

o   Benard E. Rollin

o   We need animals too much, so the best that we can hope for is an end to their suffering, but they will never get the right to life.

o   People like to form bonds with animals, that is why people care so much for their pets. In order to accelerate change in morality for the animals we use, we must raise the status of companion animals.

From Intertextual Map

I was able to use what I had written and in my Intertextual Map to write a cohesive Literature Review. It was easy to connect ideas from researchers and put them all under specific headings.

            The fifth outcome is to develop flexible strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading writing. I found that revising my writing and thinking outside the box is necessary for good writing. When writing my Results/Discussion section in my final paper, I had a hard time figuring out how to set up my writing. I tried out a couple of different styles and was able to find a way to make my writing flow.  These excerpts show the different arrangements that I tried.

Animal Testing
The video on animal testing was a public service announcement created by PETA…

Hunting
I showed the focus group a video on seal hunting, which also included gruesome footage…

From the first draft of Results/Discussion

Targeting Sympathy

One of the strategies that I tested was the use of gruesome images to target a person’s sympathy and cause shock in its viewers…

Using Celebrities

The final strategy that I studied was celebrity support. I showed the focus group a video on seal hunting…

                   From the final draft of Results/Discussion 

My first draft separated each issue demonstrated by the videos and the survey that I showed the participants of my focus group. This method did not work because that was not the point of the experiment. The point of the experiment was to see which strategy of advertising worked best. The final draft separated each advertising method into sections. I realized that playing around with different ideas in my writing and revising my previous writing is a necessary process in my writing.

In the end, I learned so much more than I expected when I began this course. I learned how to ask my own questions based on previous research, how to enter a discussion and connect past research, and how to revise my writing. I still have a lot of work to do to be a good writer, but I am now aware of the type of things that contribute to successful writing.