The purposes of this response is to provide you with strategies for doing textual research, especially at ODU, and to begin the textual research that you will be doing for Assignment #1: Annotated Bibliography and eventually for Assignment #3: IMRAD Essay.
First, read the Research Fundamentals resource on the ODU Perry Library Web Site and take the quiz. You will need take and pass this quiz for a separate Response grade. Once you complete the quiz, the library will generate a message to me telling me that you have completed it. If you complete the quiz you will receive 20 points; if you do no complete the quiz you will receive zero points.
Second, on the Purdue OWL read
Use these readings to create strategies for finding textual sources about the topic that you are studying this semester.
Third, choose a writing-related topic that you will be studying for the balance of the semester. It is assumed that this will be one of the topics that you wrote about in Response #3: Research Topics.
Fourth, ask research questions about this topic. Again, these are NOT the individual interview or survey questions that you will be asking participants. Rather these are questions that will guide the process of your research. In a sense, these serve a similar function as a thesis statement in previous writing that you have done. Where a thesis controls what you are going to argue, research questions control what you want to discover. A good way to come up with your research questions is to identify a problem related to your topic and ask questions about understanding the problem better or how to solve the problem. For example, if a problem is online writing students do not seem to want to act as a community in online writing courses, then a research question might be "What expectations do online writing course students have of their peers?"
Fifth, using the strategies provided by the Perry Library and Purdue OWL, find five popular sources (e.g., newspaper, magazines, government organization sites, interest group sites) on your topic that either help you understand the situation of your research questions better or helps to answer your research questions. Even if they help you answer your research question, that source is not the last word on the matter. You will doing your own research that contributes to people's understanding of this topic.
Sixth, write a 300-500 word response in which you...
You will be choosing three of these five popular sources for Assignment #1: Literature Review.
On February 8, 2019, submit your work on the "Classwork" page for Response #6 in the Google Classrooom