Chapter Three

Chapter three is about forming your research question and proposal. First it's important to reflect on your writing situation, asking yourself what you have learned and what you need or want to learn next.Then you generate lots of potential questions, and further define and craft these to match your situation. For example, one of the research writers narrowed his topic down by concerning only Colorado citizens instead of the whole nation. The second part of the chapter deals with developing your research proposal. The chapter goes through and explains each of the main characteristics (title page, introduction and/or research question, review of literature, explanation of how you collect information, project timeline, key challenges, and working bibliography). At the end of the chapter, there is an annotated example from a featured writer.

I really appreciated this chapter. I was beginning to worry about my project because I don't quite know exactly where I am going with it, yet class is continuing on as steady as ever. This chapter answers my questions yet again! There are great tips and exercises to help me find, develop, and narrow my thoughts into a strong research question. I've briefly done one of the activities and am feeling more confident already. The one about generating lots of potential research questions looks promising as well. I thought the section about mixing different conditional words (although, even though, in light of, etc) with phrases (we know that..., studies indicate..., it has been shown...,) to be a neat help source. I also have never written a research proposal before so the example at the end of the chapter gave me a good idea of what I need to prepare for.



Reflecting on my writing situation: (Activity on page 41) (ignore this)
1. What has changed about what I want to accomplish? Well... I didn't really know exactly before so I guess I just decided what I want to accomplish.
2. I want to inform readers by both reflecting on the issue and conducting an analysis. I further need to define my problem as being an actual problem, and then persuade readers to change habits/take action.
3. My readers: Have basic common knowledge. Most everyone knows how much sleep you need. From my conversations, almost no one gets enough. Do they know why it's so important? Is it actually that important?? I hope to answer these questions. They'll want good, credible, scientifically backed answers too.
4. What kind of sources do I want? Scholarly articles are great. National sleep foundation has great yearly polls/explanations for those as well. Perhaps a book or something?
5. The kind of document I'll write: Uh, the one that's required? .-.
6. Opportunities or limitations? opportunities: tons of great sources to read. limitations: tons of great sources to read.
7. How will my biases affect my ability to learn about the issue? Well... it's sleep. So biases aren't too strong here. I'm not too worried about it