Homework Reminder: Proposal for P2

Alright all, I apologize for this reminder coming in late. That being said I'll extend the time to turn in the proposal until tonight, Tuesday 2am.

• Go back and read P2: Theorizing Bridges .
• Write your proposal and post it up on our Class blog by Tuesday night, 2am. Remember your interst has to come off writing studies. Not sure where to look? Go back into our readings to look for topics. Think back to class discussion and all the things we talk about with regards to writing(Audeince, style, prompts, Rhetorical reading, note taking, drafts, meaning, etc. are just some of the things we've talked about)

Info on the proposal is embedded within the prompt: theorizing Bridges, but I want to spin the resources bit a bit. I'll only be requiring you to use 3 sources, 2 of which I want to you decide on now. These two can be from any of the six readings we've already done (D&W, H&F, M&G, Gillam, Sommers or Kants). I also want you to begin thinking about the best research methods to use to obtain your information. Below is alist and explanation of a number of diffrent research tools you can use. I want you to pick at least one, but you are not limited to just one. 

Surveys: A survey is a number of questions that you ask of participants. There is often little involvement with the participants. The questions you choose to put in your survey need help you answer your question, so think about what kinds of information you need. Survey’s are great because they allow you to get a lot of information fairly quickly and from large groups, but they have limitations as well. You can’t go back and ask a person why they put down what they did or be able to get inside their heads.

Interviews: Like the survey interviews allow you to get information by asking questions. These require quite a bit of involvement with your participants. The questions you choose to use in your interview(s) need help you answer your question, so think about what kinds of information you need to be asking. Interviews are great because they allow you to get the info you’re looking for while also giving you the opportunity to ask you participants to clarify or explain themselves when need be. Unfortunately interviews are timely. With limited amount of time we have with project 2 you won’t be able to interview many people, so you’ll give up quantity for quality, making your search for patterns or connections a little harder.

Case Studies: Case studies allow you to spend a lot of time with a participant, allowing you to see what it is exactly that they are doing. You wont ask questions so much as observe what people are doing, gauging their activities to determine what and why they are doing what they do when they are reading or writing. Case studies are wonderful ways of investigating the finer details of a situation. Case studies, however, are incredibly time consuming and often require you to spend long hours observing, because let’s face it people do a lot of things when they read and write and while a lot of it is important some of it may not be. It’s your job to sift through all that and focus on the important stuff. Because of the intense amount of observation Case studies are limited to only 1 or 2 participants. You won’t have numbers to support you, but you will have a rich experience to draw from.

Experiments: Experiments allow you to test your ideas out, allowing you to see how writing works in controlled groups. Depending on how you execute your experiment you may have both quantity and quality, but be careful you may end up with one or the other or neither. You experiment will determine exactly what you get here.

You may pick one or two. Think about the best ways in which you can get the information your looking for. You may have to do a few interviews and one case study, or a bunch of surveys and one or two interviews. It’s up to you to decide. Still unsure, go back to our readings and id the kinds of research D&W, H&F, M&G, Gilliam, Sommers and Kantz did? What worked for them and think about why. What kinds of results would they have gotten if they’d chosen a different research method?  

Now, I've noticed a lot of you are giving me a list. I want a proposal, a thought out paragraph in which you propose your research interest to me. So if you've given me a list go back and revise it. :)

See you on Wednesday!