With respect to the Below Assignment, Please reflect on the Field Project
https://www.homeworkmarket.com/questions/field-project-assignments-a-work-required-zero-plagiarism
Step 1: Write a 500-word post reflecting on your experience creating the Writing in Your Field Project. Comment on all stages of the project: planning, researching, writing, and revising. What did you learn from each stage? What might you do differently next time you work on a project? How might you apply what you learned from this experience to actual research/writing tasks in your career? Although this post is about you, try to support your points with material from the readings and presentations for the entire course. Properly cite any source material using the documentation style most commonly used in your field.
Step 2: Post a reply to 2 different classmates’ threads. Each reply must be 250 words. Since this forum is of a personal nature, be especially careful not to criticize your classmates’ lessons and experiences. Instead, try to find common ground.
This class turned out to be much more interesting and engaging than I thought it would be. I had no idea about the scope and variety of research styles available to writers. So far, research for me has been very limited to my local and university library or from topics looked up on line. The research world is far deeper and wider than I imagined. I am very thankful for the Working in the Archives book. I had no idea how much depth can be found in researching someone’s personal notes, photographs or even location history to gain perspectives on a particular subject. I just didn’t think about those areas necessarily being sources of research. I have a completely different view of that now.
As far as applying what I’ve learned to my own writing, I definitely see the need to spend more time reading through more research sources for any given writing I may do in the future. One of my interests is to write about the history of the U.S. Navy’s PT Boats used in World War II. I know that a handful of books have been written about them and that one or two History Channel documentaries exist. With an expanded perspective of research options now in hand, I know that when I do write that piece, I’ll need to make sure I set aside plenty of time for really digging into more than the obvious or more readily available sources of information.
I would say that I spent probably about the same amount of time between writing and editing on our final paper as I have with others in the past. I did find that I just didn’t have enough space to use all of the sources in my final product that I had originally submitted. That limit of 8-11 pages forced me to weigh some of the research pieces I had already gathered to see if they were really valuable to my overall topic or would just become more examples of a point already made. In my revision, I found that I needed to move one particular section around to have it make more sense in the overall paper along with a few sentence, spelling, and source citing adjustments.
I truly enjoyed writing our final paper because it’s a subject I am very passionate about and I found that passion shared by a few other people whom I either interviewed or read. I wasn’t alone in my topic and that helped to motivate my writing. I did find it a bit difficult to relate to the readings in the technical communications textbook, but again, it did provide some insights into overall writing ideas and approaches. I learned, too, that some people truly love to write about writing! Seeing the depth at which so many of the writers in our books go just to research and discuss the act and art of writing really surprised me. I don’t share that desire, but can totally understand why they do it.
I hope that I remember what I’ve found in this class to help me be better prepared for real world writing assignments in the future.
When I started the research for my final writing project in this course I was a little unsure of how to proceed. Since I want to be a Christian fiction writer I did not know how to explain what writing in my field looked like. I did not have a template to work with such as one might have in say a technical writing field. All I did with the style of writing that I wanted to do was tell a story. However, since I want to tell an accurate story research is very important in my field. When writing any story, it must be, for the most part, believable. Its like that feeling you get when you are sitting in the movie theater and the good guy just fell to what should have been his death but after landing he just coughs a little and manages to stand up and not only take out all the bad guys he never messes up his hair doing it. It’s just too far from reality to be a believable story. That’s why research is so important. Christian fiction writing also has planning, researching, writing and revising phases and this is what I learned from each phase.
In the planning stage I was reminded how important a good outline is. You can’t do research on a topic if you don’t know where you are going with your thoughts. Outlines keep you from getting off topic and going in the wrong direction with your research. Since I was working on a back story for one of my characters I needed stay on what was important to the storyline. The second phase was the actual research. In prior papers I did not take the time to really organize my notes. So, when it came to write my paper I spent unnecessary time finding information a second time around. This time I wrote out my thoughts as I found the information and where I found it at. It was a big help when it was time to assemble my paper. The next phase has always been easy for me, the actual writing. Yet, when it came to write my story it was much clearer and saved time in the final page of revising. Mostly in the revising phase I was looking for grammatical and spelling errors instead of issues with the facts lining up. In a sense the outline that was filled in by the research freed me up to just focus on the story.
As far as what I would do differently I would spend more time in the planning and research page. It seems to be a common desire among the writers I know to want to just write. Get the story on paper, but that can make for a lot of extra work and revising when you find out your facts don’t line up or your characters are not a true representation of what they should be.
Lastly to answer the question, how will I use this research in my future career? I feel more organized and understand better the steps I need to write with accurately. Plus, while working on our final project assignment I found that there is a format that writers are to use when submitting their work for consideration to publishers. This will be a very helpful tool when it comes time to submit my work to industry. I enjoyed taking this course and wish each of you the best of luck in the future.