We have reached week 10 of the course, and my brain feels like it is on fire. Working fulltime in libraries, specifically in a K-12 world has me feeling like I never stop these days. I am either helping young kids research sharks, or I am researching literature pertaining to academic writing. I am striving to do my best in both my education and my work life, attempting to meet my potential in both areas.  Reviewing my critical review, I think I did okay, but I can see where I lost myself. Some areas I focused too heavily and in others I left out information. Finding that balancing act of meeting the word count while also avoiding an overly critical review. I still need to really get those dangling modifiers in order; I didn’t even know what those were before I started this academic writing course, and something tells me it is going to take practice to adjust my writing. I think we all develop habits in our writing, and the key to academic writing is to understand the standard and to try to write to it.

As someone who works in library science, I always find it interesting to type a broad topic into a library search engine to see how many articles appear, it is often pages and pages long. Typing “academic writing” into a broad keyword search for articles brought me 150,000 results.  Breaking that down into an advanced Boolean search is key to bringing the numbers down.  To do that though you need to have even a basic/broad idea of what you are hoping to find for your literature review.  What I find the most difficult is formulating a research question within the broad topic. I always want to “play it safe” and look for topics that are not too niche. This is also something I related to this week when looking at the idea of problematization being used in research methodology. I had never really thought about it before, nor have I seen the word used in that context before.

Ten weeks into the course and I am learning a lot of new things, and a bit overwhelmed but I am eager to continue to better my research and writing skills.