Peer Reviews

Uh oh, peer reviews. A time to share how lousy you think someone has done on their research paper! No, not really. I'm with Genevieve, http://gcruz85-studentlife.blogspot.com/ , peer reviews are a great way to see where your writing can be improved. Everyone needs a healthy dose of constructive criticism now and again. I appreciate someone giving me constructive criticism on my research papers. It shows me where I need to improve where I may not have seen a possibility for improvement and where I did do alright and don't see it. Most of the time when I write, I do not gain the distance from it that I need to see it's weaknesses and strengths. This has always been so with any kind of writing for me. When writing fiction, it is suggested to put a piece of work away for a few weeks, or a month or so, to gain that distance needed to see room for improvement and see where it is actually good. Unfortunately, most of us don't have that luxury of time in our college courses because everything has a due date like yesterday, or so it seems, and we have families to take care of, jobs to do, housework calling... So this is where peer reviews become invaluable for anyone writing a research paper. You get that "distance" from your writing but through someone else's eyes. Peer reviews are great!

My first draft this time around was just sad and pathetic, I did not put the time I wanted to put into it. Whose idea was it to keep homework going through the holidays anyway???? They need to be horsewhipped I say! No, not really...well maybe just a little ;-).

PS...someone needs to give peer reviews to this site, the stinkin link embedding didn't work in the post! lol

Stressful previous 6 weeks!

Warning, I am about to whine! With school, getting ready for Christmas and planning and pulling off my 9 year old son's birthday party I'm ready for a vacation! Oh, I almost forgot the stress of trying to find a place to live thrown in there.

Today, one of my brother's said to me that I don't want to work...ummm okay. I'm just trying to get an associates degree so I can just hang it on a wall and look at how pretty it is. Of course, I was insulted, so I say to him, "I've worked harder than both of you put together," meaning his wife and him. Of course they laughed. I was once a rebar monkey for three years. Now this is really hard, physical labor being a rebar monkey. Rebar is that nubby steel they put into cement to make it strong, and rebar monkey is someone who installs rebar on job sites. Not only did I install rebar I worked in the shop manufacturing it into usable pieces. I also tied cages, caissons, mats, you name a form of rebar, I tied it. Rebar being steel isn't light, in fact it's quite heavy. In the field you have to carry bundles of it over to where it's supposed to be placed. Like I said this is hard physical labor. Six months out of the year I worked 90 + hours a week doing this...the other 6 I froze my hiney off working in the shop surrounded by steel in an open steel building in the dead of winter. I loved it, but it was tough. I'm just a little thing too, not many women do what I did. Anyway, my bro and his wife haven't got a clue how hard I've worked. Stay at home mom for most of my married life and that equals "lazy" to some people. All I know is that if either one of them had to stand over a mat and tie together 50 + lengths of #8 rebar they'd be on the ground crying after a few minutes, never mind having to carry it to where it needs to be installed. They haven't got a clue how hard it is to stay home and run a household while raising your children either. Yeah, I was insulted! I'd tell you what my bro and his wife's occupations are/were but then family might figure out who I'm talking about if they should happen to read this. I'll just say neither one of them broke a sweat at a job in a very, very, very long time.

Am I done whining? Yeah, I feel much better now!

Prewriting Techniques

So this week we had to choose two prewriting techniques and use them. I've done this before in my College Composition I for Healthcare Professionals class, so it wasn't anything new, other than a new topic to write about. I'm writing my research paper for Comp II on the consumption of raw milk. Pretty fascinating stuff isn't it? lol It is interesting, believe it or not. Anyway, I used freewriting, which I'm not very good at, for one of the prewriting techniques. I'm not very good at freewriting because I have this nagging little weasel in my head that makes me go back and correct mistakes as soon as I make them or when I'm rereading for the tenth time to correct mistakes...not something you're suppose to do in freewriting. I did much better with bubbling. I don't think it was called that in Comp I though...I think it was called mind mapping or something like that, or I imagined it. I came up with some fairly good ideas with bubbling.

I normally work on my own without any specific formula for writing. I'm not one to fit into a structured mold, perhaps why I hate outlines so much. I like to read my research thoroughly, then just dive right in and write my paper. It usually works for me. I don't remember how I used to write all those essays in my high school college prep English classes. Lord knows I'm getting too old to remember that far back lol. I've always loved to write though. I've missed it these last few years when I didn't have the time to write. Now that I'm in college, I have to write, so that makes me happy to a certain extent. Like I said, I don't fit into structured molds, which makes writing for college a bit more challenging for me. I think the absolute worst paper I had to write was in a previous class where the topic and references were already chosen for me. I thought I would go mad writing that paper!

Does the Internet blur the lines of “legally owned”?

Interesting topic our professor presented this week. When you consider an Internet site like Wikipedia (normally I try not to) I think in some ways it does blur the lines of legally owned. People post information to Wiki that they've obviously gotten from other places, whether from the Internet or in books. I avoid Wiki like the plague for the simple reason that it's not reliable because people post their opinions and misinformation constantly. With that said, I do wonder if much of what we learned and repeat isn't legally owned in some way? If for example we study a textbook and hopefully walk away with knowledge gleaned from that textbook, doesn't that knowledge in some way belong to the authors of the textbook? Should we walk around with those references tattooed on our forearms? Obviously not. So we do share thoughts that belong to others without giving them credit all the time to some extent. I suppose when it's in a public place such as the Internet and research papers, that we must be diligent in giving credit to the original author.

Another Internet site that I think does definitely blur the lines of "legally owned" is YouTube. To heck with blur, it outright stomps all over copyright laws. I've seen many videos that belong to anywhere from recording artists to television shows. Many people use music and songs to go along with their homemade videos that belong to recording artists. I'm amazed that the site is still permitted to exist with how sue happy our country has become in the past two decades.

Writing a research paper

I made a couple of mistakes in starting out with writing my research paper for my composition class. Both mistakes were based on assumptions and I could not find any research to support my hypothesis. Now I am back to the drawing board. It shouldn't be too much of a setback as I will stick with the same line of research only this time I will make sure I have the research to back up my premise. I will have to do some quick brainstorming however to come up with a different angle to the topic of infertility that I chose for my research paper. Any ideas would be helpful! I may go an entirely different route into the pros and cons of raw milk consumption.