Thanks for your Phase 2 drafts! Most of my comments have to do with the choice and use of your secondary sources, as well as your analyses of your primary research data. I recognize that things are probably getting more hectic for you as the semester draws to a close, so don’t feel bad if you received an Incomplete. Remember that revisions of + scores are due by Wednesday 4/28 at 5pm. Given my own grading schedule, you have one chance at revision. I recommend that, whether you’re revising a + score or revising a ★ for the Final Portfolio, pay attention to the comments below. You may also want to schedule a meeting with me this week to discuss this or the other General Feedback posts. The Writing Center also remains open until 4/28.

Let me remind you that instructions for many aspects of Unit 3, including synthesizing and incorporating sources, can be found here:

Material on D2L from Week 9 to now might also come in handy.

In order for your Final Portfolio to receive a ★, you must follow directions on this essay (as well as the others!), so make sure you are attending to the above posts and the following points carefully. As always, refer to the Assignment Guidelines and the Sample Student Essays as well.

For ease of revision, I’ve divided the feedback into 2 categories (defined again below for your convenience).

Higher-Order Concerns (HOCs): This is the most important material in your essay, the “big picture,” macro-level stuff: e.g., the claim; specific connections to your images and how they’re exemplary of your claim; development of your explanation of the claim and your visual and rhetorical analysis of each image/object.

Lower-Order Concerns (LOCs): This is the less important (not unimportant!) stuff in your essay, like grammar and mechanics: e.g., spelling, fragments, run-ons, punctuation, sentence rhythm variation, word choice.

HOCs

  • Format. Use the IMRAD structure. You should have a total of 5 sections, labeled with the appropriate subheadings, containing the information appropriate to each section.
  • Claim should have specific, unique relationship with Results. Your claim must be specific and unique to the set of data in your Results section. A claim that is too vague will make your primary research seem inessential and derail your secondary research process. A claim that tries to simplify or hide problems in the community by emphasizing vague positive qualities will create confusion for the reader.
    • For instance, if I claimed “Saint Seiya fans are sometimes hostile to each other but in the end it’s a welcoming place for anyone who loves the series” but my Results section is about “shipping wars” (in which fans are interested in the success of particular relationships) that transpire through hostile personal attacks (e.g., u/CapricornIzo making body-shaming, ableist jokes about unemployed anime nerds) and aggressive homophobic remarks (e.g., u/Ppppppeter saying that fans who perceive and “ship” gay relationships are “mentally ill” and “should be shot”), my claim is not only non-specific but also doesn’t have a unique relationship to my Results. Based on my Results, I should instead claim, “Saint Seiya fans on r/SaintSeiya may seem welcoming but they engage in lots of conflicts over shipping, or the way fans are invested in certain relationships. This hostility is shown through personal attacks about shippers of an opposing relationship that use mental health stigmas, body-shaming, and homophobic remarks to try to silence those members or convince them to switch sides.” This claim is much more specific and uniquely goes back to a pattern I noticed in my Results section.
  • Your claim must be about a specific social dynamic that emerges in the forum through users’ interactions with each other. To this end, make sure to include dialogue or exchanges in your Results section. Reactions from members to an opening post or a meme aren’t enough to show how interactions occur.
  • Claim should be visible throughout your essay. Your paper explains how you reached your conclusion about what the patterns in the primary data mean. I can’t stress this enough, as this is essential to fulfilling the basic parameters of the assignment.
  • CRAAP Test. Your articles must pass the CRAAP test. Refer to the Ethnographic Research Tutorial and the Vetting Sources worksheet for a reminder. Blog posts won’t work. Articles from sites with an obvious agenda or bias—such as PETA or NCAA—also won’t. Articles without a clearly named author won’t work. Google Scholar, JSTOR, Academic Search Premier are your best bets but make sure to do the CRAAP test on sources you find.
  • Introducing and Summarizing Sources. Follow the format in the Sources and Analysis blog post. You must spend two paragraphs on each source (1 para. introducing and summarizing the claims and sub-claims, 1 para. applying it to your Results) as indicated in that post) for the Phase 3 draft to be considered a ★.
  • Don’t be simplistic or reductive in your analysis. The point of the Analysis section is not to say “all my threads have the same result” because by virtue of being different posts and threads, this will never be true. You must account for the differences and the specific dialogue in your Results section will help you see that. For instance, if your claim is about the creation of hierarchy in your community, and the exchanges in your Results section show that use clever wordplay based on TV show quotes get ~800 upvotes but dialogue exchanges that are bad-faith trolling get ~10, you cannot conclude in your Analysis that “these threads all show hierarchy”: of course they do. Your job is to always ask what kind. hierarchy is being created based on creative use of language and knowledge of television dialogue.
  • Don’t be simplistic or reductive in your use of your sources. As stated in class, summarizing an article in one sentence before extracting quotes or otherwise applying it suggests to an academic reader that 1) you didn’t read the article, 2) you didn’t understand the article, 3) the article doesn’t actually work for your project. So don’t just tell me in one sentence, “This article talks about XYZ” and apply it by saying “XYZ is in my community.” A source that’s pages long requires a paragraph of summary, in which you identify the key points the author is making.
  • Do not quote or engage with the primary research in your sources. If your source uses r/baking as an example, leave it out. If it interviews 23 Facebook members, you shouldn’t engage with those interviews. Your focus is the ideas and arguments made about that primary research. Most of this information is likely to be found in the first 2-3 pages and last 1-2 pages, but may also be sprinkled throughout.
  • Your use of the sources should go back to the claim. Don’t restate what you said in the Results section in the Analysis section. Spend only 1-2 paragraphs analyzing the specific wording or features of the quotes in your paragraph. Your sources should all demonstrate a connection to your claim about a social dynamic. For instance, if you use an essay about how linguistics is taught in undergraduate classrooms in South Korea but your claim is about how collecting and discussing sports memorabilia brings members closer on r/sports, you can’t simply say “This source shows how unity is created in an environment.” That’s incredibly broad. The connection may not exist between the source and your essay if there’s too many differences to account for. In this example, you’d have to explain why and how the author’s claim about 1) a classroom, 2) South Korea, 3) linguistics is relevant to a paper on collecting memorabilia.
  • Do not engage with the article’s examples or primary research. Meaning, do not quote or incorporate the following: 1) the secondary sources they quote; 2) any interviewees they quote; 3) the case studies they cite. Doing so makes it look like you should have been looking at those sources instead of the one you chose.
  • Sources should address a social dynamic in a community. As a reminder, this is the easiest way of going about your secondary research. Think about where the article is published. If it’s published on a place like Newswire (a news aggregator) or Harvard Law Review (law journal) then the impression your reader will have is that your claim is relevant to an op-ed or a legal analysis…if that’s not the case, avoid that source.
  • Cite correctly. Use Purdue OWL to format your citations correctly both in the body of your essay and in your Works Cited. For instance, in-text citations never italicize article titles, and parentheticals don’t include titles. Incorporate sources with the correct bibliographic information–use article/chapter titles, and not journal titles (e.g., New Media and Society) or not database titles (e.g., EBSCOHost) and not university presses (e.g., Oxford University Press).
  • Quotes must be followed by explaining in your own words. Quote only essential language and explain everything you quote in your own words. Everything you paraphrase must be locatable in the text. It’s hard to provide your reasoning if you’re just cherry-picking quotes and telling the reader the quote applies because you observed something similar in your own field notes so avoid quotes if that’s all you plan to do with them.
  • Paraphrase Whenever Possible. Cherry-picking quotes as “proof” that the article “works” doesn’t really demonstrate that you understand the source well enough to appropriately incorporate its ideas…. and in fact can demonstrate the opposite. Every time you use a direct quotation, the sentence immediately after it must explain that quotation in your own words, before you move on to applying it. Thus, it’s often easier to paraphrase unless you need the exact language of a quotation—for instance, if Judith Butler is defining her own term “performativity,” you may want to quote that directly; if an author is describing “the fear of missing out,” a much more mainstream concept, you may be more easily able to paraphrase that without losing any of the definitional nuance.
  • Applying Sources. Explain how the source helps you think through your claim differently. That is, how do other authors’ ideas provide a lens through which you can interpret the patterns or exchanges you noted in your Results section? If you borrow a concept coined by the authors, how does that apply specifically to your community (e.g. why does this concept become central to understanding your community, instead of any other way of explaining it? Make sure to provide your reasoning in building these bridges.
  • Avoid listing. This is really about transitions: as we’ve done in other essays, make sure to avoid transitions that indicate “another” example, as “listing” words like this don’t tell the reader how an idea, piece of data, or secondary source connect to the claim.
  • Avoid judgment/evaluation. In an essay like this, it doesn’t matter so much how you feel about the process of observation or about the results you’re collecting, so minimize any judgment, evaluation, or “pure opinion” about your observations, the process of observing, or a source. Your reader doesn’t need to know how you feel about a source—it doesn’t matter if you thought it was “interesting,” or if you liked/disliked it—they need to know what the source is about and how it applies to your claim and data.
  • Avoid positive and negative. As we’ve discussed all semester, these words mean very little—so instead, be more specific about the exact tone, emotion, atmosphere, type of communication, or pattern you notice.
  • Avoid other types of generalization. In short, don’t make grandiose claims about broad groups of people or about the Internet, anonymity, technology, or society.

LOCs

  • Get in the habit of Googling authors for name spelling, field of research, for preferred pronouns (listed on their website or Twitter bio most of the time), preferred names, etc.
  • Call sources and authors as they are: articles, not journals; chapters from books, not novels; scholars or theorists, not novelists.
  • Write naturally and not like a research narrative–for instance, you don’t need to describe how in real time you read an article and found something interesting, or how you chose a source and were surprised by information on page 300. Remember, even though this is for a class assignment, the best written assignments are the ones that don’t sound like an assignment.
  • To go with the above, there’s no need to write “This is my A or B source,” as it sounds incredibly artificial–again, like an assignment instead of like a cohesive, critical paper. (It also reads like the sources aren’t necessary and are only included because you were asked to include them… and while that may be true, you don’t want your reader reacting that way.)
  • You can use “Ctrl + Enter” for a page break (instead of hitting enter a bunch of times), and here’s instructions on creating hanging indents in a Works Cited page.
  • Don’t italicize direct quotes and don’t bold or underline titles. Refer to Purdue OWL if you’re uncertain of the formatting but generally, article titles go inside quotation marks; book titles are italicized; quotes are within quotation marks. No other kinds of formatting are necessary.