Quick Access 28,30,31

28) In Developing a Search Strategy I read that you need to begin with an organized way to collect the information necessary for your research paper and with this collection you also must have an organized way to represent how and what type of information you collected. There are three basic methods that can be used, it just depends what sort of topic you have chosen to research. There are also two different types of sources that can be gotten, primary and secondary. Primary resources are first hand that can be got by surveying or observing things yourself and secondary would be any research done from books and the opinions of experts that you may use. So in order to record all of the information that receive either through surveying, field research, observations made or interviews done there must be a particular style and format that suits it best. Whenever research is done, some details about where it came from should be taken down right away so that it will make a bibliography later much easier. There are two types of bibliographies, working and annotated. A working bibliography is a beginning list of sources that have been gathered together and just have some basic qualities. An annotated bibliography is all of the sources but also the author’s comments about what they got out of the source and what they put towards their research paper.

30) Researching the web wisely is very useful for this research paper that we are writing. Library databases can be very useful and reliable as compared to the general web that anybody can put anything up. One thing I learned was that a URL stands for Universal Resource Locator which makes a lot of sense, when the web is used somebody is usually looking for something or sharing their knowledge, making resources available to all. Search engines can be very useful if your topic is specific enough and you don’t only have to use keywords in order to search I learned that there are broad subject directories available to click on and they get more narrow and bring up some websites that will pertain to your specific topic. There are also search engines that use a bunch of other search engines, which basically is like a mega search engine, which can be useful if your topic is narrow enough, because if it is too broad then too many websites will come up that don’t really have any useful information for you. Once you find the websites, you must decide whether or not they can be trusted. Generally reliable websites have specific endings in the URL that pertain to education or government, they also have authors that are experts in their subjects, they can be print sources that have been put online and they also should have been updated recently so that the information is current.

31) Plagiarism is when you give somebody’s ideas and they appear to be your own. Plagiarism can range from something that is very intentionally wrong like taking a paper bought offline to a small thing like forgetting to put quotation marks on a sentence. Some other countries may consider it acceptable to copy the writing of experts in the subject area even without citing their information. In order to prevent yourself from getting trouble either in school or in the workplace it’s so important to learn about proper citing and quotation techniques. Not only should you make sure to give credit to the sentences that you use in your paper but also to the concepts and ideas that you get from reading the information that’s researched.

Portfolios

In some ways I am more confident about the portfolio due at the end of the semester and in others I am a little nervous about. I am not concerned so much about the formatting and everything that has to go along with the formatting because there was a lot of good examples and very detailed instructions on what to do. I just need to take the time to review it all and not miss anything. I’m also not too concerned with the writing because I feel like there is a lot of time to try and make improvements upon it and we are getting a lot of peers help with our writing skills throughout the semester, so we should be prepared at the end.

I am nervous about the readers not being able to relate and I have never really had my writing looked at without somebody knowing that I wrote it. I feel a little uncomfortable because of this but I think that all f these worries should be washed away through solid hard work throughout this semester and then there will be no way that I don’t end up passing and being able to write for the rest of college.

I feel pretty good about the portfolio and I am glad that there is so much that is preparing me for it. The guidelines and such are very helpful and the passage rates make me feel more at ease with it.

Writing about General Apache & Simplicity

Writing about General Apache was very interesting to me. A teacher trying to write about a student trying to write and express his feelings can seem a little confusing at first. I really enjoyed the fact that this teacher allowed his students to choose topics that particularly interested them, in turn making their writing more powerful and great. It's really meaningful that through sitting down and listening to General Apache's life and experience this teacher was able to compile it into a nice poem that truly expressed and perfectly expressed what went on throughout his life and all of the topics they spoke about in their meetings. This lets me see that the message a writer (General Apache) is always there it's just difficult to express and an experienced writer (Harrington) is able to express it because he has had practice and taken time to write it out. The poem that he has written reflects upon when happened during the Vietnam War and it reflects on the troubles that General Apache has had in the past. In the second to last chunk of the poem it explains how Apache uses the past that he has to help kids with the same sort of problems and he uses his knowledge and experience to do so.

SImplicity by William Zinsser is also very interesting. I never really noticed that some things are so unnecessarily complicated sometimes. It makes sense though that things tend to be complicated, as our brains are complicated themselves. With all of the stimulus and different things going on it is hard to clear our heads and get a straight path and train of thought. People may feel like making things too simple would be bad and perhaps it would make things sound childish or unprofessional. This is not the case at all though. If you would like to get a point across to a maximum amount of people it is best to use language in a way that will apply and be understood by all. Just because language is simple doesn't make it bad, it can be very good, even better than complicated words that cloud up the message you are trying to get across. Like Zinsser says, it takes work and hard work at that so if anybody tries to simplify and be straightforward with their ideas their writing will be simplistic but very powerful, understood and enjoyed by many. He reflects on the different examples of airline pilots, presidents, and authors that use complicated and simple language and he goes on to tell the reader that they can accomplish these things through hard work and clearing of our minds before we can clear up our writing.