My Eyes Are Bigger Than My Stomach

 I have a bad habit of trying to bite off more than I can chew. What stuck out to me in chapter 2 is that "Academe and professional communities prefer gradual advances that build on and preserve conventional practices and knowledge over paradigm shifts that overturn what has gone before (Kuhn 1962)" (Hughes & Hayhoe, 2008, p. 31). I have been in the process of starting my research for my master's thesis, and before I read this chapter, I worried I wouldn't have enough information. After reading this chapter, I realized I need to focus my topic more. Right now, I have hordes of research to read but no clear picture of the question I am actually trying to answer. For example, I don't need to try and prove that everything on Youtube uses narrative. That is an insane amount of research to do. However, I can look at a few YouTubers who use narrative and how that might draw subscribers to their channel. I have a long way to go, but this chapter made it seem more palatable than before.

Hughes, M. & Hayhoe, G. (2008). A Research Primer for Technical Communication: Methods, Exemplars, and Analyses. Routledge.

Comments

  1. Madi English-6401August 31, 2021 at 8:12 PM

    Hey Dawn! I am super interested in your research topic after reading this and talking to you this week. I think hoarding a bunch of research is very common for people to do as we think if we have tons of research then we must be doing it right. Now that can be true for some things, but it is good to keep in mind that in research projects you do not have to do it all. Focus on what you want to find out specifically and really dive into that. I am excited to see where you go with your research, and to see your finished project in the end.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dr. Florence Elizabeth BacabacSeptember 2, 2021 at 3:51 PM

    Hi Dawn,

    As mentioned before, I really LOVE your topic since it allows you to closely examine which technical aspects of narratives might possibly affect a specific type of audience/subscribers, etc. Of course, there are various directions you can take for this type of investigation, even tweaking the research goals as you discover prior research, but the gist of the topic overall is very ideal within a TWDR research context.

    As always, start plowing through some scholarly articles to distill your interests a bit more (I'll also introduce the Lit. Review writing assignment #1 next week for this purpose). Once you're ready to start your research design -- whether textual analysis, qualitative, or other type of research method -- let me know and maybe we can set a brief Zoom meeting to talk about it, ok? Am here.... =))

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The YouTube Sized Gap

So here is the thing, I feel like for these blog posts I have had a secret weapon, mainly I am currently working on my thesis so I already know the topic and gap that I am trying to fill. Granted, I am only looking at a section of my thesis for my work in this class. That being said the paragraph below is borrowed from my literature review, as I addressed the gap there and I felt it was well written. I think it would be especially exciting to look into how narrative is used to draw in and maintain subscribers on the YouTube platform. Gaining and maintaining subscribers is often the main goal for those who create videos on the platform because the more subscribers they have, the more views they might get, and the more views they get, the more they will likely receive from ad revenue. So if it could be proven that narrative improves a creator’s ability to gain and maintain subscribers, it could provide greater incentive for the study of narrative by the rising generation who now have dre...
Read more

Editing, Editing, and More Editing

 My main goal for revisions is just to fill everything out. I have a basic plan for what I want to do and how I want to write it, so now I just need to do it. I also appreciated Emma's suggestion that I needed to clarify the type of narrative structure I planned to use in my analysis because I mentioned more than one in my literature review. My plan is to focus on Labov's structure because it is the simplest version. Labov's seems to be narrative structure broken into its smallest forms which are perfect for YouTube videos. Especially since YouTube videos tend not me be much longer than 20 minutes.
Read more