Thlog 5

This week was pretty important for class! We spent a whole class on the concept of “moves” which probably means it’s going to be a huge factor in PB2A and WP2. I’m still struggling with the idea a bit, but the breakdown of the wrestling move and Michael Jordan’s layup were helpful. I guess my struggle is connecting it to writing, but now that I think of it, analyzing the reading for Wednesday’s class was really clarifying. Identifying moves are going to take some time and practice until I’m any good at it, but I will work on it because Zack (and the reading) have convinced me that my life as a reader and writer will be better for it. 

 I also really appreciated the mini lesson italics! I’ve always struggled with when and where to use them in my writing. Thanks to Zack for giving us these really useful writing tips! Monday’s topic of operational definitions was cool because I’m learning about the same thing in my psychology classes. Trying to define and measure something that isn’t concrete (like fear, happiness, and love) is a real challenge of experimental psychology, which I hope to go grad school for! The IMRAD thing was helpful too since I’m beginning to read and analyze research papers outside of this class for my other classes. 

I’m struggling a little bit with ideas for a WP2, I’m nervous about picking a topic and not being able to write enough about it. I just need to get working on it I guess! I won’t be in class next week, except for when I videochat in on Monday, so I’ll see everyone in week 7! Wish my lacrosse team luck in nationals next week in North Carolina!!

PB2A

I decided to look at a study that examined the perceived “prosocial effects and enhance(d) social interaction” (Kirkpatrick, Wit) effects of MDMA or ecstasy. The abstract is a short paragraph that is basically a quick summary of the entire research project that’s placed at the beginning of the entire report so that the reader can easily see all of the important parts of the research. The two researchers here, Matthew Kirkpatrick and Harriet Wit begin their abstract with a rationale portion. This is kept to two sentences, which is in line with the goal of a quick summary. It describes that MDMA is commonly thought to have pro-social effects, and counters that claim academically by saying that MDMA’s effects have only been studied in lab settings that have more non-social conditions. This seems to be their hypothesis, which would make sense to put at the beginning since everything else in the research is going to reference back to the hypothesis.

Next section is methods, which describes the methods by which the researchers tested their hypothesis. They describe three settings in which participants were given differing levels of MDMA or placebo. One convention in use here is the abbreviation of words like solitary = SOL and other participant present = OPP. This is also contributing to keeping the abstract as concise as possible since these words are used frequently throughout the rest of the paragraph. The abbreviations keep the paragraph from becoming too wordy, which is helpful for the reader to not get lost.

After methods is a section on the results. The researchers list the first part of their results on the physical effects as “expected” which leads the reader to believe that this is in line with other studies on the drug. The researchers seem to be subtly appealing to the reader’s ethos here as they boost their own credibility by implying that some of their results are the same as other research. They then go on to describe their own results, but do not attempt to analyze or make any connections back to the hypothesis. This is an important convention of this section since they are simply stating the results. By not making any conclusions, it allows other researchers to draw their own conclusions about the findings, which can provide more credibility to the study.

Lastly, the researchers state their own conclusions. They do not make any concrete, hard-line statements about their results, but merely suggestions. This is common in scientific papers since there is no absolute truth, but merely well supported theories. They are modest about their findings and do not try to dramatize their conclusions or claim a major breakthrough. This is another convention of academic papers as it also provides some credibility to the study. Major breakthroughs are rare in science and to exaggerate findings would discredit a study. At the very end, the researchers express the possibilities of further research that they discovered through their research such as the potential for other variables to have changed the effects that MDMA has on social interaction (Kirkpatrick, Wit)

Overall, the tone of the abstract was academic, but not overwhelming. The language was concise and understandable to the average person. Sentence structure varied in length, and was at times difficult to follow. There were never any unnecessary flourishes or fancy words and everything was done with the goal of being as short in length as possible in mind.

The researchers explored the question of if MDMA had prosocial effects and if it enhanced social interaction like is commonly believed.  They operationalized social settings by assigning a value of N = 10 for solitary conditions and N = 11 for the research assistant present and the other participant present conditions. They most likely operationalized social interactions and the level of socialness that each participant experienced, but the method for that was not described in the abstract. The most important aspect to me is the final sentence of the conclusion where they pose possible new research ideas to the reader. This is truly academic to me because the whole point of academics is to learn, and the researchers put out to the public the areas that they discovered weaknesses in their research instead of keeping it to themselves. This way, the public can expand on this information for the advancement of public knowledge.

Source used:

Kirkpatrick, M., & Wit, H. (n.d.). MDMA: A social drug in a social context. [Scholarly project]. Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.ucsb.edu:2048/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=ecc4dbb9-9e21-47c0-bd4d-81da883c2443@sessionmgr114&hid=124&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ==#AN=102482562&db=a9h

Thlogging with one arm

           This Wednesday I had surgery so I wasn’t able to get the most out class unfortunately :( . I’m really bummed I missed because so much valuable info is given out in class but I will survive! Monday, I really enjoyed the highlighting activity we did on our WP1’s before turning them in. It really highlighted (pun intended) the lack of class readings as sources in my paper and some lack of analysis that I hopefully expanded on in my revision that night. I definitely have a lot to improve on for the portfolio, which is good since revising a perfect paper wouldn’t be very fun or educational. I just finished the reading for Monday and I feel like I’m finally getting a better hold on how to read more critically and effectively. I think I’m taking better notes for my other classes out of my textbooks and that I’m getting more out of my readings since I can think critically about things like genre, purpose, and audience (among tons of other things obviously). I’m still struggling with getting sources into my paper and organization of my paper, but overall I’m proud of the first academic paper I’ve put out in almost two years. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any formal writing besides lab reports but I’m finding that I really enjoy it! I’m learning so much and now that I’m going into my third year, which hopefully means research papers, I think that the tools I’m learning to use will really be helpful for my academic career! I also really liked the points that Boyd made in “Murder! Rhetorically” I never knew that most people have the tools to write in genres that we aren’t trained in, like writing eulogies or a coroner’s report. I actually did the exercise everyone else did in class on my own today and wrote an online local news article about Mark Smith’s murder. Even though I’m not a local news reporter, it read very similarly to other articles that are out there, which was pretty cool!

Thinking about Writing 2 in between lacrosse games (thlog 3)

My lacrosse team just won the first round of championships this morning against UC Davis and we're going on to play UCLA tonight at 6 so if you're reading this before the game, send some good luck vibes our way! If we win tonight then we play for 1st place in our division tomorrow morning and a guaranteed spot to go to the national championships next month!!!!
Anyways....This week we really dove headfirst into our WP1s! At first I was a little overwhelmed, but I think I pulled it out well. I’ve tried to stay on top of my work and it’s definitely paying off by having more time to sit and think about my paper like Zack talked about in class. Something else Zack mentioned in class really stuck out to me and encouraged me to really amp up my thesis. He said to raise the stakes of your argument, and that helped me change my thesis into a stronger one (I hope!). I also really appreciated the direction he gave about peer reviewing. Most specifically, only writing questions down on someone’s paper was really helpful for me. I’m still struggling a little bit with the dashes in my paper. I tried to use one or two, but I’m not sure if I’m executing it properly. Looking back at the journal responses, it seems a lot of people are enjoying the topics they chose! 15 and 16 in the responses talk about how their paper is a little long and how they might be rambling on a little bit and I had this issue when I was first writing my paper too. The advice I gave myself was to cut out a lot of the unnecessary words like “really” or lists that weren’t needed. Basically anything that wasn’t essential to my argument or to describe something important, I cut out. I ended up with a paper still almost 6 pages long but I think that I cut the fluff (a phrase my old high school English teacher used to use that stuck with me!) out of my paper. I’m really excited to see how I end up doing with this paper since I haven’t written a formal paper in a year or two. I definitely put good work into it and given it some careful thought. One last thing, thank you Zack for letting us get our papers peer reviewed before we turn them in! Such a good opportunity to get one last set of eyes on it! 

Thlog 2

           Obviously, we had a short week in class with Zack in Houston. Regardless though, I think we learned a few interesting things in class, by writing our PBs, and in our assigned reading. Before coming to class, I thought I picked a pretty good and specific topic for my PB1a by choosing a movie review. I was so wrong… I definitely could have gotten more specific by choosing a comedy movie review or maybe even a comic book-turned-movie franchise movie review. I’m glad I made this realization sooner rather than later so that I can catch myself in the future. Person 10 in the journal responses this week definitely realized it sooner than class time, and had a really good way of getting super specific. Once you choose something, what is a sub topic you can write about in that bigger topic? You just keep answering that question until you’ve got some really specific, weird sub-genre that is really one of a kind!

 In the readings, I was glad to be reminded of pathos, logos, and ethos, which are things I haven’t been taught since those early high school years. I also appreciated the emphasis on rhetoric, and the topic brought up in class that rhetoric isn’t just about politicians lying. Rhetoric truly is all around us, even in things that aren’t words (like the Phelps example we had in class). I’m glad I ended up being randomly assigned the word exigence to work on during that group discussion. I’m still struggling with the idea a little bit, but I’m sure it will be brought up more in class discussion and that I’ll be able to make the connections soon enough.

PB1B

          I couldn’t get the computer science generator to generate more than one paper, but I was able to identify some conventions that I think would carry over into other generated papers. Most clearly, there is a pattern of a very structured, outline style of writing. The reader’s eyes are first drawn into the large, bolded title. The goal of making this font larger and darker than the rest of the paper’s font is to grab the reader’s attention and to inform them, in a handful of words, of what the paper is about. Beneath the title, smaller in size but also bolded, is the list of authors. Computer science papers seem to have more than one author, as usually more than one person works on the research that is explored in the paper. The next thing that the reader notices is the bolded headings of the different sections of the paper. The paper is structured in a clear, outlined format that is easy to follow. Each heading is clear and short, usually one word, so that the reader knows exactly what to expect from each section of the paper. The first section is the abstract, which is a fairly short description of what the paper discusses. Six headings follow the abstract, some of which have subheadings that go into further detail about that particular subject. The general tone of the paper is formal and academic. It is obvious that the audience is intended to be other academics in the field, as can be seen by the use of technical and complex terms that the average person would not understand such as “exploring lambda calculus” and “we can easily visualize pseudorandom epistemologies”. Though they are filled with complex terminology, the sentence structure is generally simple, without unnecessary flourishes or complexities.

            The next generator I looked at was the comic strip generator. The conventions for this genre were a little harder to pin down, though there were a few common things that stood out. First, there were always the same two characters telling some kind of short story over the course of three panels. The characters were depicted fairly consistently with most panels showing them in a full body with speech bubbles coming from one of the characters. Occasionally, another object was put into the panels to add a visual effect to the words spoken by the characters. For example, in one panel the character says, “Your cat is dead”. That character is also seen holding a dead cat in that panel. The characters were also set against a very plain backdrop, which forces the reader to focus solely on the characters and what they are doing instead of anything in the background. Another convention that was common in the comic strips was cursing. Some people find cursing to be funny, which is the goal of comic strips. The comic strip panels also made a few references to current trends like dubstep, iPads, and Instagram to bring a genre that used to be primarily found in newspapers to seem more modern on the Internet.

            Looking at these websites can really help someone understand genre if they pay attention to what makes each site unique. By discovering what the common themes are of the comic strip generator, it is easy to make the connections to what the conventions of these comic strips are. Comic strips are visual, and the goal is to make the reader laugh. That becomes obvious by looking at even just one or two examples of the comic strip by seeing the visual aspect of the comics, and realizing that the textual content is not addressing any serious topics. As stated in the prompt, these are “plug and chug” websites and if someone takes the time to understand the general format of the “equation” that these websites use; it is much easier to begin to understand the concept of genre.