Week 9: 

Writing a critical review was a good way to start writing academically again in a shorter form. It has been around 4 years and change since I have had to writing a legitimate paper . By receiving feedback from the instructor, it gave me a number of different resources to use for citations, formats and research areas. These resources will be valuable for me in the future to format the following papers I do in my studies. Owl Purdue was a great resource for citation and formats that gave sample papers which I compared the format to my own to make sure I was getting “easy” marks. Something the sample formats couldn’t fix was my lack of grammar skills. Parallelism and commas were a common mistake made in paper. My hope is the more I write and read academically this will lead to honing these skills. One of the comments Dr.Volek made was to make time to write and find the time to do so. It is like anything else in life you need to practice improving on those skills. In the first assignment the article we had to read was probably chosen to allow us to apply it to what we are doing now in this course, improving our writing.  I found it easy to relate to the “bad writer” persona and see why I had those feeling towards writing.  Maybe the assignment had more to it than just a critical review it was to show us as students that we are not alone with our feelings towards writing and academic writing. 

The lack of academic writing in my current career is an excuse for me to ignore the rules. I have noticed that in notes and emails my writing tone and focus has changed to try to articulate myself better. Little daily reminders to be implementing the changes in the “classroom” to the outside world even if it is not the same application. 

One the major pieces of I have learned is the language used. The more I read academic articles the more words and phrases that can be borrowed in a sense to help my writing. The active voice that the authors take is another piece that I have been focusing on. With the combination of those two it has pushed me in the right direction for the literature review. I keep grappling over some of the sentences in my critical review that I wasn’t overly happy with the more I think about it. Putting together a well-structured and written literature review will be no small task but trying to apply graduate level writing will help my cause.  

This will be the first time I write an abstract for a paper and reviewing the examples has given me insight into what is expected for that portion of the paper. A brief overview but should pull the reading in to want to further read the paper. Lastly building off my comments in prior question simply seeing the format of the literature and how others have pieced it together with different topics provides a few ideas on my structure. Taking pieces of different samples whether it be how the history was laid out or the studies done. When it is my first time doing a research paper or something unfamiliar, I try to draw from other who have successfully done it.