Research Proposal Letter

This assignment was an interesting blend of having to do something similar to a rough outline of a paper while also formatting it in a way that felt less scientific and more persuasive. The writing I chose to use in this assignment was, therefore, a middle ground between the more statement nature of a scientific article and the first person persuasiveness of a letter. To achieve this I started by writing how I would for a formal letter. Later, I went back and re-read the letter to change the tone of certain passages to feel more matter-of-fact rather than conversational. I normally am not great with general drafts or outlines, so I approached the assignment from a different angle. I feel like this assignment would have been a bit better if it focused more on the persuasion aspect and less on the formal writing aspect. Overall, the assignment itself was nothing terribly difficult and helped as a basic idea outline for the paper later in the semester. 

Annotated Bibliographies

This assignment was a little tedious, but it ended up being useful in the long run. Writing the annotated bibliographies wasn’t anything difficult. The writing could be however I wanted, and the majority of what I had to write was simply summarizing the article I am choosing to use for the research paper later in the semester. However, doing as many as I had to in the time allowed just made the assignment a little tedious in the last third of it. The reading wasn’t the issue but the monotony of repeating the same thing was due to needing specific things in the summary rather than doing what I wanted. The assignment was useful later on though as it allowed me to skim the entries and determine which reference I needed to do in the paper. It also allowed me to be able to get the general idea of the source quickly and save time looking for the specific parts of information that I wanted/needed for a specific part of the research paper.

Resume

The resume was nothing new for me as I’ve had to do them as assignments a few times in high school, and I’ve had to do actual resumes for job and leadership position interviews. Overall, this feels like a normal, everyday resume assignment. Presentation is standard, no fancy writing, and nothing ultra specific was asked for the assignment. Because of this, the resume itself feels very natural and run of the mill. I wouldn’t say I did anything special for how I organized and presented my resume, but rather that I described and listed everything that might be of importance to the best of my ability. I organized the resume in a basic format based around importance. Basically, I organized each section of the resume in a way that the level of importance stayed constant in one direction (i.e. going further up the list means more important than higher in the list).

Research Paper

This assignment was a basic, scientific research paper. The idea behind this paper was to be a literature review of how video games affect our cognition. I decided on this topic due to having many people tell me how bad video games were for me when I was younger, and I figured there was plenty of research to prove the contrary at this point in time. The structure of the paper is a basic IMRAD format that has a bit more emphasis on the discussion and results section over the methods and introduction. The reasoning for this is that I would prefer to discuss a topic than to simply grab someone’s attention for half the paper. To me, if the reader’s attention has been grabbed, wasting their time with 500 words of more introduction isn’t the best. This can lead to some people losing their interest as it takes too long to get your point across in a meaningful and easy to understand way.