Extra Credit

The topic I am choosing to write my issues paper on is rape. It can be a sensitive subject along with a broad topic so it has been a little difficult to narrow a certain area of it down while also talking about it in a mature and respectful way. The way I plan to narrow it down is by focusing on things that influence why rape happens. Such as the mentality of victims and what could possibly have increased their chances of being sexually assaulted. One example I am using in that area is how college girls are more outgoing and accepting of strangers because they are meeting new people all the time and don’t always realize that not everyone can be trusted based on first impressions. Another area of rape I am talking about is how different cultures have different things that influence the rape in their countries/culture. In my issues paper so far I have talked about India and how their imbalance in gender roles contributes to the rape in their country. Also regarding India I am explaining how their difference in education of men and women affects their amount of sexual assault.

My target audience for my issues paper is mainly the American people but could also be geared towards women and men throughout the world. By talking about colleges in the United States, I explain to Americans how being a little more cautious about who you meet could be beneficial and also that it is important to assist someone if it seems they are getting themselves into a bad situation. My paper could also relate to the American people when I talk about India because they could realize how universal of a problem rape is and that it is a problem that we could help reduce as a world together.

The concerns I have about my paper are that I’m not sure how to tie all my information together because it doesn’t pertain to one single country. I am also a little worried that my paper will not have a great amount of emotional appeal because I’m timid about adding actual accounts of rape for the reason that they may be too strong and upsetting to the audience.

Extra Credit

While thinking of possible topics I could use for my issue paper I remembered a debate I had read in my A+ class. It was in a 7^th grade Junior Scholastic with a debate on whether schools should keep sports or not. The question I am framing my research around is “Do the benefits of school sports outweigh the faults?” When I first started researching I thought it was a mainly national issue. As I continued my research I found that it really is a global topic. There have been numerous studies done outside of the U.S. I am pointing out the faults of discrimination in sports (especially to disabled individuals) and also addressing the claim that athletics diminish academic achievement. I will support the claims that athletic involvement is actually beneficial to students in ways such as building character, teamwork skills, confidence, decreasing obesity risk, and social skills. I will also point out that if high school athletics were not in existence then would we have collegiate sports, or professional sports? Would we have events such as the World Cup, Super bowl, or even the Olympics? Definitely something to think about.

                My target audience is school administrators, parents, and local government authorities. I will mostly be talking about high school. One thing that is common throughout education is academic achievement. Since studies prove that sports result in higher academic achievement I can use this to appeal to school administrators. Parents always wants what is best for their child or children so I will stress the benefits of athletic involvement. Points will be made that sports build character, friendships, and confidence.

                The thing that worries me most about this research paper is finding information that says, or proves, what I want to say. This issue is current so studies are still being done. It’s not that there isn’t enough information, it’s just finding the right information. This can cause a lot of trouble. I don’t believe I will have a problem in reaching the page requirement. This is a topic that I have a strong opinion about. I believe that a big struggle for me will be keeping my personal opinion and bias out and letting the facts do the convincing. My fingers are crossed that I can find this balance. Seeing as I am a very opinionated person, this is an everlasting struggle I have in almost all assignments. 

Happy Birthday to my roommate Shannon !

My topic is how environmental factors may be a cause of the sudden outbreak of juvenile diabetes. I still need to finish narrowing my topic. I think what I am going to do is choose a few environmental factors that have enough research to be supported and that could be the cause of juvenile diabetes. I also talk about the difference between type 1 and type 2 to show the severity of type 1. I have many options right now that I still need to choose from. I know that I want to do viral infections but there is a possibility of childhood diet, vitamin D deficiency, and pollution.

            My target audience is parents. I think my argument will appeal to them because they have their own children and are worried about their kid’s well being. I will especially address them in my conclusion because I want to talk about the symptoms of juvenile diabetes. If the parents are well informed than they have less of a concern worrying about what is wrong with their child if they become ill with type 1 diabetes. They will be able to notice these symptoms and get help to their child sooner. I still need to target them though because I feel like it is very broad, but I am not sure how I am supposed to do this.

            I have a lot of concerns with this paper. I feel like I have no idea what I am doing and that it is all going to turn out wrong and I am going to have to redo everything. I am no sure how I am supposed to incorporate my own analysis because I feel like the quotes are self-explanatory. I do not really know how I am supposed to formulate my thesis. I do not know what causes I want to focus on because I find a lot of information that supports and denounces all the sources. I am not really sure about my audience. I think it is good but then I am not completely sure how to tie them into it. I am also really concerned about the length. I feel like I am going to run out of information or things to say. Especially because my topic does not have a set solution. Going into this essay I do not feel like I am prepared to write it, I feel like I am going in blindly.

issues with my issues

            As I have written my paper I have run into many struggles especially in narrowing my topic down. With the topic, youth in religion, I have been taken in many directions with my research. This has proved to be a real problem. First I targeted my audience towards Christians. This proved to be too broad. I had an incredible difficulty finding one source for everybody’s problems. However, while exploring retention rates I discovered that protestant faiths were on the lower end of youth retention. This caught my attention. Because of this discovery, I narrowed my audience to protestant religions. By doing this I have been able to find a common thread. This thread is not a sure thing but it at least gives me a little more direction. The thread that I found is unity. Unity in the church that is. I discovered that the religions and churches with the highest retention rates were either global churches or they had a strong sense of unity in their customs and culture. The Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, and Catholics all have a strong sense of unity, whether it be in the customs they follow, the pope or the prophet. Unity is also the major thing that he protestants are missing. With so many churches, different pastors and interpretations of the bible it is difficult for protestants to be united. Once I narrowed my topic to this I chose three subtopics. These are topics that have been claimed to be the cause of youth leaving the church. My goal was to take out the counter argument by linking them to unity. in my paper I am trying to connect religious ignorance, historical turnoffs, and strong enticing of outside alternatives to a lack of unity in the protestant faith. This gives me direction but I am still concerned about how I can effectively develop my arguments based off my research, and how I can make the whole thing flow. It is a lot of pages to fill and I don’t want to sound as if I am rambling. I still have a lot of work cut out for me but I am confident I can pull it off. By addressing my audience, almost as if in a letter, I can make it clear who I am addressing and I can use aggressive diction to both show my professionalism and the seriousness of the issue at hand.

Extra Credit Post

When I first began the process of writing my Issues Paper, I knew that I wanted to write about the film industry and I specifically wanted to focus on how Hollywood (with its preeminence on the global market) influences cultures around the globe. On my mission, I found it interesting how widespread American culture has become and I wanted to do research on it’s implications.  Then, as I started looking around, I found a recent article about film censorship in China. I found the issue to be really interesting, so I stuck with it. As I began asking questions, my topic eventually narrowed down to what it is now. Also, as I began to really dive into the research process and began to better understand the issue itself, I also began to narrow down on what kind of information I was going to focus on in my paper in order to make an argument to my audience. As I grew in knowledge, I was able to sort through information, and even through aspects of my thesis and outline, throwing away anything useless or irrelevant and holding onto the gold.

My target audience is American film studios and filmmakers.  I hope to craft an argument geared to this audience by establishing ethos early on in the paper. I think that my audience is interested in money, but they are also interested in praise. I want to help them see that my argument will, in the long term help them to achieve both goals. I want to use many examples (comparing what is happening in the American film industry to what happened with the American auto industry, talking about the production process of Iron Man 3 to give a good taste of what kind of measures are having to be taken in order to get a quasi-American blockbuster on the screen, and even showing what kinds of films are being censored, what are not and why). I also want to back up my evidence with data and fact. I think that any money-maker is interested in the numbers. They want to see quantitative proofs. I hope to be able to deliver this.

The only lingering concern that I have as I continue the process of writing this paper is just making sure that I am able to have fluidity in my paper. I have many things that I want to say and a lot of evidence that I would like to include, but I’m afraid that the final product might just be a lot of information with no rhyme or reason in the way that it is organized in the paper itself. In order to prevent this, I am going to spend some good time creating a better outline before I continue the writing process. I feel like this will save me time and energy later.

Extra Credit Blog Post

One of the resources I've found to be very helpful in helping me narrowing down my topic for my issues paper is the GALE Reference Library. It has been very helpful in helping me narrow down my topic and what questions I plan to answer. I also found that making a list with a lot of questions has helped me figure out exactly what I've wanted to focus on, and then I just researched from there. Finding certain research, and articles on what questions could be answered throughout my paper really helped me organize my paper in numerous ways that I didn’t even know when to start. Once I started, it was easy to make all my topics, examples, and ideas flow together because I already knew what was coming next and how to connect the two ideas was just something I had to figure out.

I realized that my target audience can be anyone, but I want to mainly focus my main points around those students who think that dropping out of college is a good idea. I have never thought it is a good idea so I think by adding my own personal thoughts into my argument and paper will benefit the purpose of why I am writing the paper other than I am just writing a paper based on others ideas. It will be very difficult to sound persuasive when a lot of money is involved considering that the major reason why college students dropout of college is because of the financial burdens and costs they’ll have to pay during their journey through college. I think I’ll have to craft this argument into helping my audience see that not only is this big expense going to be a befit but it will be a very big one in the long run when skipping through college isn’t the wisest choice you can make. Its always hard to be able to predict the future, and I can’t really use myself as a credible source in that way because I just started college, but showing statistics and stuff will help make my paper a little bit more formal. I don’t really want to focus my paper on being a research paper, I kind of want it to be more like an opinion editorial paper on steroids I guess.

 

One of my biggest concerns with a paper this size is just making everything flow together. Its something I will have to keep in mind the whole time, but it requires a lot of time that it will be difficult. It has been easy to research and find relevant sources to my paper, I just hope it all will come together nicely. I know what I want my paper to look like, and I hope I can perform that so it will be one good paper.

My first thought for this research paper was how I could incorporate something I wanted to know more about, not necessarily a topic I was well educated in. I decided to write about Muslim women and their role in society, their homes and the history behind the oppression of these women. Or if they even see themselves as oppressed. With no strong questions to thoroughly guide my research, I began to search for articles to guide my thoughts. With limited background knowledge on Muslim culture and the Islam faith, I figured starting anywhere with my research would be helpful. I did learn quite a bit but all my findings didn't seem to provoke any more questions to focus my broad topic. Continuing my research, but feeling a bit overwhelmed with such an enormous topic, I went to work hoping my co-workers could offer some guidance as many of them have written many research papers previously. I was right. They gave me great advice of how to research more efficiently and in a conversation with one of my co-workers, I learned of a neighbor of his who was Muslim. He had grown up near this Muslim family his entire life and remembers very clearly the devastating attacks on September 11th. The next day after America was still in shock at what had exactly happened the previous day, my co-workers Mom woke him up for school and said that she and his Dad needed to talk to him before he left for the day. His parents sat him down and tried to explain what had happened in New York. My co-worker was only 9 at the time and said he had a hard time understanding the effects of the tragedy. His parents explained to him that kids at school would try to bully his Muslim friend, Amina and that they would say terrible things about her family. They reminded him that he needed to always be kind, but especially to watch out for Amina. Throughout both of their lives my co-worker and Amina have remained friends and have discussed in detail, how hard it has been and still is to be a Muslim in America. This intrigued me and also made my topic become less daunting. I've decided to write about Muslims in America, specifically through a Muslim women's eyes. As I returned to my research, this time with very specific questions, I found a lot of great sources and evidence to support my claim that Muslim-Americans have been mistreated due to the impact of 9/11. Much has been written on the subject, with many first-hand accounts of Muslim women, explaining the difficulties they've grown up with living in America and still being faithful to their culture and their faith. My audience will be American citizens, as we are the ones who need to be aware of this stereotyping and mistreating of Muslims within America. I hope display this problem in America through the perspective of Muslim women and raise awareness of the issue. My biggest concern in writing would be finding enough information and strong evidence to carry my thesis throughout the entire paper.

Issue Paper Extra Credit

I've heard that some people start writing their paper with developing a thesis beforehand. I tried doing this but based upon my research I had already developed a thesis. I just had to lean towards what all of my research was point to. Once I developed my thesis I has so many thoughts. The more I writ e the more I find out that I create so many ideas and thoughts that I want to include into my paper. Sometimes I spend just an hour trying to see how I want to organize my paper and before I know it I've written a paragraph. Something that I notice that helped was the bibliography that we had to do. As I looked at that I was able to see what my plan was for cited that article or journal entry.

My targeted audience is an inter-denominational council of American Churches. Because it’s multiple faiths I've tried to be less bias as possible. Although they know that I’m representing a Mormon’s opinion about why youth are leaving religion it was challenging to give my reason they could connect with all of the other faiths. The way that I narrowed my topic was providing in my article examples of studies done by other researchers using different religion sects. For example for one of my reasons I wrote about why youth are leaving religion I used a study that sampled 742 Korean American Students who were apart of the Baptist, Methodist, Sung-gyul, Full Gospel, and Presbyterian church. This was the only way I knew of trying to connect all religions on one viewpoint. I knew that if a use doctrine for an example of why the youth were leaving then that would create a strongly bias opinion.

Some questions that I have about research is if it’s appropriate to cite someone who has write a topic issue who cited someone else in their article? For example I found some on HBL library I found some articles that didn't have reference pages. Should I cited the author although he cited someone else? Would that make my paper loose it’s authority and credibility? As well I used a scripture in my paper and I was wondering what the rule for quoting scripture is? In my paper I used my opinion to create my theses and provided sources of studies done that can make my opinion not seem bias. I also included personal quotes from people. These people aren't anyone special like famous well known religious leaders. They are just people who fit in my topic that share their experience that connects with my thesis. Does using this give my paper authority? 

Extra Credit Blog Post

I’m excited to read other’s blog posts on this subject. I’m not so sure that I’ve narrowed down my topic as much as I should. That’s why I’m looking forward to looking at these blog posts. That’s what they’re for, right? So I’m still looking for ideas. That naturally leads to the next part of the blog. My questions. I guess my main questions are the same ones as I had with the rhetorical analysis. I’ve done many research papers before, but not with thesis’ and not with me taking a stance and trying to be persuasive. I’m wondering how much of it is fluff and how much of it is really stuff that I’m needing to keep. I also have questions about the format. What is the most effective, and how I should lay it out in order to give it the greatest impact to my intended audience. As I’ve been thinking about my paper, my intended audience has changed a lot. My topic is South Korean education, and at the start I was going to try to compare it to the United State’s system and analyze the benefits to our economy should we change our education system to match that of South Korea’s. After trying to research that, I realized that that would come up fruitless. Now I’m just analyzing on a broader spectrum whether or not implementing different parts of the South Korean education system would be beneficial. Thus, my audience has broadened just by virtue of making it a more applicable to the general public. While at the start my hope was that the audience would be economists (who would be the audience because I was going to connect it to the economy), lawmakers (who possess the political power to change the educational system), and parents (who, if persuaded, would provide the backup needed to back the change in the education system). However, my goal now in writing more broadly is to attract all who read to come to the same conclusions that I do. I hope to write it in an interesting enough way, with enough background information, that anybody could pick it up and read it and be intrigued, and hopefully compelled to action. I realize that with this, though, will have to come much more thought. I’ve already spent much more time just thinking about how to write the paper than the other papers so far this semester. While the other papers this semester have rather easily just come out of my head straight onto the paper, this one has proved to be much different.

Starting the Research Process

My research process involves reading through many news articles. Since my paper is all about American media in the Chinese market, it has fairly easy to find information on this topic from online news sources. Also, since this topic is quite current, I have been able to find many articles with Kairosis! This has been useful because if I was only finding older information about this issue, my paper wouldn’t have any relevance. One thing that has been a bit difficult is my search for peer reviews.  Since the Chinese SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) isn’t willing to release information pertaining to their guidelines, it has been difficult to really understand their system of censorship.  From what I have already been able to tell in the little research that I’ve done, the best way to really understand what kind of content they are censoring is to just look at a list of banned films and to look for patterns.

The way that I have conducted my research thus far has been mostly through “Google News” and the “Opposing Viewpoints in Context (GALE)” through the HBLL Research Starter Guide.  Both have been very useful, but I actually found that the best source material was coming from the HBLL Search Engine.  They seem to pull from a variety of quality sources and eliminate the bad ones (which come in on Google Search). Also, as I have learned to master the art of using “keywords” I have been able to get sources which are super relevant to my topic.

One thing that I could I could improve upon as I move forward with this paper is sorting through and organizing all of the information that I am finding through my research. As we discussed in class, it is important when researching to have some way of keeping track where all of your information is coming from. Whether this be by creating a Google Document to store keep track of which info is coming from which sources or by creating a table in a Windows application like Word or Excel to keep this organized.  I also want to make sure, as a complete my research process and begin writing the actual paper, that I am not plagiarizing in any way.  I want to begin to separate my own ideas from the ideas found in my sources. I need to start now to implement these techniques so that it will save me some time in the future.

Search and Research

In my case, I find research to be more of a necessary evil: something that needs to be done if we want to learn the truth about any given topic, but something I am incredibly untalented at. It’s actually kind of sad how bad I am at finding the right key words to lead me to the topic I’m studying. It’s rather like a video I saw a few weeks ago of a choir director who was so tired of his students singing badly that he recorded himself singing Oh Holy Night, and intentionally made every singing mistake imaginable, and after playing it for his students said that was what he sounded like. The only difference between this story and my own ability to research is that my mistakes and overall lack of ability is not intentional. That leads me into the question of what I will do to improve the research process, both for this paper and for future ones. Mainly my plan is just to work on gaining experience: surely the longer I attempt to find more information through searches, the higher the probability I’ll come across something useful, and hopefully as I spend more time researching I will gain more experience at it and start to recognize what will make good search criteria and what will not.

            There is a slight issue with the idea of researching that I am working to get over, as well. The whole idea of some sources being more trustworthy than others does make sense, I suppose, at first glance, but instead of learning to distinguish between the two, I’ve developed the habit of distrusting nearly any information regardless of the source, unless I can prove it for myself. An example of why I’ve developed this habit was given in class today by one of the other students who is researching climate change. He mentioned that he’d found trustworthy sources giving data that were in complete opposition to each other, that there was no way they could both be correct. It’s because of situations like that, where there is obviously a strong bias by the authors (probably on both sides), that I almost always assume that the answer lies somewhere in the middle, and that unless I have the ability to work it out for myself, do the experiments and run the numbers, I can’t possibly know for sure what the actual truth is. On the one hand such a strong sense of skepticism can be extremely useful to weed out biased information. On the other hand it makes it very difficult to form an actual opinion or conclusion.

            Basically my goal is to keep searching for new information and more sources until I get good at distinguishing whether a source is in fact trustworthy or not, and until I’m convinced that a specific viewpoint is correct.

Research

Having never done a research paper before, I have had to try different methods of finding a source and then figure out which way works best. The trial and error method of figuring out how to find a good source was a little frustrating at the beginning, but once I figured out what worked best the research process was a lot less stressful.

My research question deals with rape and there are many topics that could be covered dealing with rape. In order to narrow down the topic of rape, I first researched rape as a general subject and then found a more detailed aspect of it. I found that using the library databases is the easiest way to research. The library databases, I feel, gives me the most credible and accurate information, so as of now the only research I have really done has been through the library databases. I know that my issues paper is going to need more information than that which I can get from the library database, so I will have to search the web more and try to find articles that give more first hand accounts of rape victims to add to the ethos of my issues paper.

Right now in my research process I think I need to be exploring more about my subject as a whole so that I can find a specific part that I want to expand on in my issues paper. I have been focusing my research on more of the statistics side of rape and I think that it is important that I also look at the emotional side and gain some insight from those who have been rape victims. I also think that it will be helpful to look at psychological articles on rapist and rape victims to put information in my issues paper on how to prevent sexual assault.

I just failed my cleaning check ):

Usually my research process would just consist of going on Google and searching my topic. This time around I went through the BYU library website which I found very helpful. It was pretty easy because you just type what you want and it pops up. It can also be a little frustrating because there is so much information and it is hard to narrow down to want you want exactly. Or for instance, there was a lot of information on my subject and it made it harder to narrow my topic because there was so much to choose from. I liked going in with such a broad topic and then finding what I really wanted to talk about. It made it so much more interesting to me because I found things I did not know previously.

         So far the only research I have done has been through the BYU library website because I thought that the five sources that we found for our research homework had to be from there. But now that I know it can be from other places I will begin looking at other sources. I really like the EBCOE portion on the BYU library page because I was able to find specific things I wanted to talk about. Also, I feel like the information I gathered so far I am not going to use because now I have learned about all the sources I can use, which will be better sources for my research paper.

         One thing that I can do to improve my research is to be narrower. At the moment I am researching how environmental factors bring on juvenile diabetes. There are so many different environmental factors that I think I should try to focus in on just one. Also, while I am researching I need to organize my information better. So far I have just copied and pasted the URL into a word document. I want to try to include the author, title, and a brief description at least. It would also be helpful to pick out the information I plan to use so that I do not have to keep going back to the source to try to find the specific part I want. Because now I have to go back to the URLs that I carelessly copied and try to find out what I liked about them. Future paper I plan to be more organized.