Reagan Braker

After finishing my rational argument, I feel like I have learned many things throughout the process. When I first started I thought using academic journals would be hard, then I learned otherwise. I realized when writing this paper that finding academic journals and reading them was not that difficult. And I even ended up using more than two academic journals during my research. In addition, at the beginning of writing my academic journal, I initially was a firm believer that social media does a lot more bad than good. But through the process, I started to realize how much good social media can actually do for us. It can assist us in connecting with others, help us learn new information, and build community. Even though there are a lot of negative aspects of social media, it offers many great opportunities to. When writing my rational argument I learned more about what defines a rational argument. Since I had never wrote one before, I did not have any knowledge or details on creating a...

  This past Friday we went to the library for our second visit to learn about scholarly research and started on some more research. This Friday we focused more on how to choose a research topic. We got an overview on how to choose one and then we did an activity on it. In the activity, we were handed three different random words and we had to develop a research topic about the three words. This activity helped a lot with learning how to develop research questions. It made you have to think a little bit out of the box and think about how these topics would go together then make a research topic. When learning more about how to choose a research topic. We learned how some research topics will be broader than others and how some may have many pieces to them. The example we were shown was like a puzzle of how they all fit together. We learned the first step is to find your research topic.  Mine is “What negative effects mental and physical does social media bring? The second step ...

  This week we were able to go to the library and learn more scholarly research and I learned a lot of new information that I didn't know before. The librarian taught us the general definition of what academic journal and how to identify one. We also learned how different people define scholarly research in different ways and it can look totally different to some people. She provided us with examples of scholarly research for us to discuss as a group and that was a good activity to learn more about them.  We were walked through how to use the North Central Library online and how easy it can be. There are so many resources, from scheduling an appointment with a library in person or even online and using the Cardinal Search. The Cardinal Search was a great resource to learn about to help find our academic journal and different sources for our project. I'm so glad I was able to learn about the online library it will be so helpful for this project and other classes too.  I wa...

  This week in class we started learning about our rational argument paper and read over some examples out of the textbook. We discussed what makes a good rational argument and how when doing your research about the topic you may reconsider your original stance and that’s okay. Suppose we were to argue in a close-minded way that would be considered an irrational argument. We also talked about how to find a good academic journal to use and how to read it. We also collaborated on our ideas on what we were going to write about for the rational argument paper. After thinking about it I think the topic that I wrote on for my microtheme would be a great option on social media. I’ve started doing research and starting to map out a draft today a little bit. This upcoming week I need to focus on finding an academic journal for my paper and developing my draft.

  After finishing the documentary project, I feel a lot better about the final draft that I submitted than my first copy. I learned a lot about the writing style through the draft and how to improve my writing. I liked the documentary I chose to watch Dark Days thought it was very interesting. I'm glad I enjoyed the documentary it made writing about it a lot easier and enjoyable to write.  Throughout the paper, I had a few different aspects of my paper that I struggled with that needed improvement. One of the struggles I encountered while writing my documentary project was the analysis. When I did my first draft I did not have an analysis so I had to add that. I also struggled with my setup phrases at first throughout the paper so I had to figure out where to add those throughout the paper. Also, the format I didn't have was correct but I was able to work on that before submitting my final draft. Overall I improved and learned a lot after finishing my final draft.

When I first began working on the documentary project I was a little confused about what to write about. But after we talked about it a couple of times in class I have started to understand the expectations and made some changes in my writing. At first, I didn't understand what the analysis was but now I've gotten a better understanding of it after talking about it in class. I’ve watched the movie again for more clarification on what to write. I was able to take some more notes on the parts of the documentary that I felt I needed more information on. Watching it a second time was good for me I noticed a lot of events and scenes that I didn't the first time. Yet, I do not feel it is fully ready so I believe this week before Thursday I’m going to have to put some more work into my paper. I'm going to use what we went over in class and the notes I took from the movie to revise and make it better. I might have a classmate read it over again since the first time that helped ...