Nicole's Log
We started the class out with filling out our notecard that said “I think I’m finally starting to understand ______. But I’m still unclear about ______.”
Mat read the poem “Eclogue at Midnight” by Yusef Komunyakaa.
Sammy & Lauren read logs from the past couple classes because there was a mess with people that dropped the class.
The research proposal was due before class today, February 15th. If you go to Mat’s office hours, he will grade your first paper if you visit him in his office hours in Dodd Basement Monday & Wednesday 12:30-1:30 and Tuesday 12:30-2:30.
Interview – Due the 22nd
If you can’t interview the person you’re researching by the 22, email Mat saying all of the facts “I’m interviewing _____ person. On ____ day. At ____ time.” Before the interview, the syllabys you should have about 10-15 questions prepared ahead of time. The interview should allow for you to answer questions regarding your research into the genre practices of this community. Allow for the interviewer to lead you to sources that they use considering they are already in the community. Ask open-ended questions. Try not to ask yes/no questions. Bad thing about having 15 questions, it doesn’t leave room for follow-up questions. EX: “Do you think I should research the prelaw side of this or the criminal justice side of this?” Follow-up “What in the prelaw side of this do you believe would better suite this?” Helpful hint: get something that’s quotable asking their opinion on something and then ask them if you can quote them in it because it’s very important.
Annotated Bibliography – Due the 27th.
More than ½ of the research paper has to be analysis of genre, analysis of the research, etc. Some of the annotated bibliography will go into the research essay but most definitely not all! Make sure the 10 sources, 7 of them are academic, scholarly and/or peer reviewed sources. He reminded us about Owl Purdue which is a website that gives us everything we need to know about MLA, APA, etc. It’s super easy to follow. Look at the sample papers because it shows exactly what your paper should look like. Mat says we could do “block paragraph” because he believes it looks nicer, but MLA doesn’t like it like that. Mat hints that our 3 unscholarly sources should be “on-the-ground research” so they should be real people, an ignorant twitterer, etc. You can have more than 10 sources, but do yourself a favor and don’t do more than 10 for the annotated bibliography – especially because we need to briefly summarize the source and its main ideas, tell how the source relates to the research topic, tell how the source relates/does not relate to the other sources, and mainly, tell new/different information this source provides; explain weaknesses/strengths of source; tell what about the source the student finds especially interesting.
Christian and Sam will be talking about Consider the Lobster.
Christian did not go off of the blog postings. Christian brings up “A Modest Proposal” which is about a 19th century satirical piece about being a low class person in Ireland and it’s totally satirical and the writer talks on and on about eating babies. He ties it into how it’s similar and different from Consider the Lobster because they both bring about this social change. CtL is the social change of animal rights while aMP is about human rights. Both shows this evolution of change of rights over time. Christian said that we can incorporate our own style into it as the authors did with CtL & aMP and how we can write it however we want and how our options are limitless and to not bore ourself with this monotone piece.
Sam brought her blog post let us watch 30 seconds of a pilot of a show called “Community.” Sam talked about the ethical appeals of Consider the Lobster. We are influenced by how things taste, smell, feel, and we get uncomfortable when we hear about how other countries eat dogs. A lion won’t not eat a lamb because it’s cute, a shark won’t not eat a fish because it smells weird. Sam then tried to read multiple people’s blog posts whom were absent and she liked their point of the overall theme of I accept your point of view and I appreciate it.
Mat took back over the class and looked over the Consider the Lobster and we talked about the footnotes and how footnotes are usually short but Wallace made most of them overly too long. He likes what Sam said about thinking about humans and how it can be very persuasive if the person can identify with that.
Hannah asked if we did footnotes, and asked if it is or is not part of the word count. If the foot note is a typical Wallace footnote about analysis or whatnot, then yes, count it, if it’s just a typical footnote, then no, don’t count it.
Mat goes on to talk about how Wallace was biased against the lower income or against the whole lobster fest community and how we should not be like that, especially since we all should want to join this community. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes he’s just mean. We shouldn’t write like that for our research paper.
Like the first paper, we focus on texts but since it’s a 3,000-word paper, we may select more than 1 genre. Don’t need to find academic sources about genre or texts, use Instagram, facebook, twitter, etc. We can use that as “on-the-ground” research. Look at Purdue Owl to find how to cite sources, they may have how to cite Instagram, etc. Also think, What kind of genre am I writing in? Every professor is going to have his/her own spin on it and so it may be more of a narrative, a guide, etc. There are all kinds of genres of research papers. It’s ok to have multiple genres. We can always go to his page under the tab “PAST CLASSES” and there we can find examples of how past students have done the projects, how they’ve done the annotative bibliography, etc.
We got into groups during the last 10 minutes to all try to get an academic source before the end of class.
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