Writing prompt: Discuss the ways in which you’ve used the, “Three ‘R’s’ of Inquiry,” in the ongoing process of completing your MRP?

The first “R,” reading, continues to play an essential role in the process of my MRP completion. For instance, I can’t count how many scholarly journal articles and lengthy reports I’ve read throughout this research process. If I wouldn’t have taken notes in the margins of the articles, highlighted important sections of the text, and circled unfamiliar words, I am certain that my understanding of the articles would have been greatly decreased. I agree with the author of this article when he stated that, “Vocabulary is vital to the operation,” of reading proficiently. It just makes sense that a reader’s comprehension of the text’s content is hindered if he/she keeps struggling to understand the vocabulary used by the author. Another efficient technique I used when reading my source information was to use the surrounding context of an unfamiliar words to get the gist of its meaning until I could look it up later. I don’t immediately look up unfamiliar words unless they are abundant, because that tends to extend the reading process considerably and I become less focused. I also prefer to print computer articles off of the internet because I find it harder to read from a computer screen than from a paper (maybe because computer reading is less familiar to me).

For the purpose of the MRP, I have used , “Writing as Inquiry,” as a means to better format drafts of different genres and other related writings. I found that writing linearly when drafting an initial draft failed to really match my internal thoughts. Personally, I think in a rather haphazard manner, so it works much better if I can instantly write down ideas/thoughts in this form and later put them into a precise, linear format. In this article, the author says, “Throughout the writing process writers plan, revise, anticipate, and review, moving back and forth among the different operations involved in writing ‘without an apparent plan.’” Since I changed my essential question and foundation questions, I have planned new ideas for my project, revised old pieces of writing, and constantly reviewed my writing so that improvements could be made. I guess that the author’s aforementioned statement really does make sense because I have shifted in between these writing processes without ever really formulating a plan about which ones to use and in what order.

Although I have never done an activity such as the op-ed piece (mentioned in the article), I have been exposed to discourse analysis. A few of the CD. 315 weekly assignments dealt with learning how to judge webpages and articles based upon criteria such as, audience, authority, currency, and then noting where sources should be cited or where supporting evidence is needed in the text. Completion of these assignments greatly helped me to now be able to judge and analyze my research-related sources. I now feel confident that I can distinguish a scholarly article from one that is not, and this is a crucial skill when conducting MRP research (although most of our sources are required to be scholarly publications). Throughout this research process, I have kept an online journal that allows me to tell about the various processes I’ve used in completing research and why I have used them. This journal is similar to the student oral presentations that the author talks about in the article, in that they both require the student (me) to clarify personal thoughts/ideas, and then explain them to others.