research writing – A.D Sugarbaker

Focus this week: Camp NaNoWriMo and Research Questions

This week I split my time into two separate projects I was working on.

The first half of the week was occupied with my research essay. I took my list of questions and sub-questions that I had developed for my research topic (Gender Roles Through the Ages). Using google scholar, I was able to find around fifteen sources to read through and search for things that would relate to my essay.

I knew when picking this topic, I wanted to focus on how gender roles were affecting the people and the outside world with the way these roles seemed to work out in society. That required me to do a little more searching for some of the topics. It also meant that a lot of my research was creating empty links between quote to topic.

I spent a lot of time trying to chunk quotes to the topics I wanted to break into. It was a lot of color-coded notes and topic revision. I have yet to start the essay and instead I have been focusing on finding topics and quotes to back myself up before even going. I’m working in the prewriting stage of the essay. Actually, I seem to be barely in the prewriting stage. I’ve just been trying to find quotes to work with.

The second half of my week was the focus on Camp NaNoWriMo. I’ve gathered a few friends to build a cabin and work together to complete Camp NaNoWriMo. I spent a lot of time re-designing a very old idea I had. I’ve always wanted to do something dystopian but explore the work of a monarchy.

I found use of a website called Realtime Board/Miro ( https://realtimeboard.com/ ). It was an endless whiteboard that I’ve been story building on. It really helps me with my messy note writing habits. I also took an old sketchbook that I found lying around and used that to create the character trees in an easier page that will also be within my reach during this project.

I’ve been getting overly excited about the project and I found something I was really looking forward too. I was really worried that I wouldn’t find something that I could work through. This project was one that I was looking forward too after revising and working through it. I also have been trying to break down the project into new characters and break them away from those I created in The Underground.

Focus this week: Embedding quotes in a research paper

This week I trekked through the various pages of embedding quote and went through the selection of notes. Although this seemed to be something so repetitive and something that I thought I knew how to do, I learned a few different methods of placing quotes into my future research paper.

Methods such as sandwiching, setting off quotes, introducing with the use of colons, and building in quotes were new methods I tried out during the week. These were methods I had heard about (maybe not by name) and had seen multiple times in papers.

On top of learning these methods, I also learned how to actually use brackets and an ellipsis in writing. Both of these options were something I had seen so many times before but never quite knew how to use them myself. Through the help of the guidelines on the papers, I was able to see and understand how and why they should be used. It helped open my eyes to why a writer would use something like brackets or use an ellipsis.

Through many of the in-class activities where I was pulling either my own quotes or using the ones provided, I was able to see how to execute a process like putting quotes in so they weren’t floating.

This week of embedding quotes helped me create an idea in my head of how to put quotes logically into a research paper, something I hadn’t considered before. I used to just drop them into the random placement of a paragraph to just hit a word count or length in a page. After some practice and close note taking, I was able to work through the methods of embedding quotes without just dropping them and leaving them floating.

Week of 2-19-19 work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IlV0SvSIgm7GgHVoUtcsLq319c9_r3jy65nlg6UTnAU/edit

Tag: research writing

Week Of 3-11-19

Week 2-19-19