Hey everybody! I cannot believe
that I finally have a complete draft of my paper. Although it still needs quite
a bit of love, attention, and editing, I am so proud of how far I have come,
just as I am sure that many of you are as well. We have been working on our
projects for close to eight months now, and so it is so rewarding to finally
have something tangible to show for all of the work that has been done. While I
can see the finish line approaching, I know that there is still a lot of work
that needs to be done, and so I know that I need to continue working hard to
push through the last month of research.
Knowing
that editing my paper is now the next step in this process, I am going to talk
about what I see as the good and bad with my paper. To begin, I am going to
start on a more positive note by addressing the parts of my paper that I feel
are the strongest. First of all, I believe that my literature review provides a
solid foundation for my paper. I spent a lot of time meticulously planning,
writing, and editing this part of my paper, and, as a result, I believe that I
do a good job in explaining the significance of my research, and articulating
where the gap is. Additionally, in my discussion, I think that I also do a good
job in articulating why I got the results that I did, and how this differs from
what was expected.
Now,
moving onto the bad. When I think of the flaws in my paper, the most glaring
issue is my word count. Right now, I am at approximately 7200 words, and so I
need to cut over 2000 words. Throughout this process, I have known that the
word count was going to be an issue, because of the qualitative nature of my
research, and the use of multiple methods to collect my data. Despite this,
though, my thought process has been to write what I think is necessary, and
then go back and cut what ends up being unimportant. With this being said,
though, I did not think that I would be this far above the word count.
Fortunately, though, I know that concision is something that I frequently
struggle with in my writing, and so, I am sure that a lot of words can be cut
out if I spend the time to go through the paper and cut unnecessary words.
Despite
the high word count, I still do not feel very confident about my results
section. Even though I feel like I was deliberate and thoughtful regarding what
I included in my results section, I feel uncertain about how I went about the
qualitative analysis by discussing what I found with each theme individually. I
think that this approach may have used up more words then what was needed, and so
I have been trying to think of a more concise way of including everything.
Anyways,
so for the people who will be reading my paper this week, if you guys could focus
on finding parts of my paper to cut, then that would be really appreciated! Thanks!
Until next week!
Brian -- I know we just met, but I want to reemphasize what level of heart attack you gave me when you told me that your paper was over 2000 words over the word count. I think I had an allergic reaction to you telling me that. For those of you going to edit his paper, I would work both on removing larger sections as well as rewording things that are unnecessarily verbose.
ReplyDeleteHey Brian! I really enjoyed reading your paper and learning about your project and your results but 2000 over the word limit is a crazy amount. On my document on your google drive I think I pointed out sections that you can definitely cut down on. Overall, you are really wordy with everything that you say and you tend to say things over and over again from paragraph to paragraph and section to section, when if you cut that out and substituted in more deliberate conclusions, it would make your paper a lot more concise and also a lot more effective.
ReplyDeleteLiterature Review:
Overall, I think you reach a good conclusion at the end, but you go over a lot of stuff that I think may be unnecessary. I say this in my comment, but I think that instead of focusing on public schools so much, you should just talk about the variance and what that entails and then transition into talking about charter schools much more quickly, since the topic you're exploring is charter schools and the part about public schools seems really long and tedious if you're not going to be talking about that in your actual research. Then, you can definitely more concisely show how there is conflict in the conversation about charter schools' effectiveness (bc rn you have it structured in a really long and wordy way- be more deliberate about showing the conflict). By restructuring and focusing more on the conclusions you're trying to make (making more connections and drawing out more from the points you have), you'll have a better literature review that is also more focused and therefore MUCH shorter.
Methods:
Your methods got really confusing at times. One thing that I especially had an issue with was how you conducted your theme analysis just by reading through your transcripts twice, which is super sketchy and not actually a methodical way to conduct theme analysis. Idk if this is okay, but I would ask Ms. Haag, since just reading through it and finding themes is kind of iffy to me, but idk. Also, your explanation of your coding sheet was very confusing and long winded. I wasn't sure if you were using the coding sheet to look for certain aspects of the situation you were observing or if you were using the coding sheet to analyze something. If you're going to use the coding sheet, please have a way more specific description of how you used the coding sheet, because it's not intuitive. Also, how you got/why you're using this coding sheet and the categorization you use later is not explained fully. I don't know why you can use this coding sheet or the categorization (also did you have markers for the categorization, more than just categories?). Throughout your methods, you tended to use really vague language that added words and that didn't further the reader's understanding of what you're doing. Use more specific and concise language and it'll be much easier to understand. Also, you can't say things are important without justifying why they're important.
Results:
quick note- You don't need to explain exactly how you transcribed everything. Your results are really wordy as well. I know that you have a LOT of moving pieces, but you explain everything really vaguely. You're using a lot of words to explain things super vaguely. I like how you go through each of the themes, but you don't substantiate them with any quotes or statistics so it's not super convincing. Also, you need to tie your results to broader conclusions, but probably in the discussion. You just spend a lot of time discussing things and making points that you don't draw conclusions from.
Discussion:
ReplyDeleteYour discussion is 2000 words bro it's so long. I think that, once again, you spend a lot of time making points that you could make in fewer words and you don't draw out enough conclusions and you don't connect it to explanations of why you got the sources. I didn't really understand why you needed the part about standardized testing and i think you may be able to cut that out because it's kind of tangential, but i may have just not understood the transition. Overall, you really need to make more conclusions and draw more connections instead of just making points.
Good luck cutting down your 2000 words! I hope I helped by pointing out some sections that you could delete!
lol when i tried to post the comment it said it was too long to post as one comment sorry
ReplyDeleteHola Brian
ReplyDeleteOverall: One thing I noticed, especially in the LR, is you tend to not connect sentences together which makes it a bit jumpy. Also, you tend to be very wordy, which adds to this jumpiness and lack of cohesion. By cutting down on wordiness and making sure your sentences are connected (just simply adding transition words will help) I think your paper will flow nicer and not seem as sporadic.
One thing that I think would help with your wordiness is think "Is this straightforward?" You have an issue with going in a huge loop just to get to the point. Just state the point in a concise manner and it will cut down your word count.
Literature Review: You need to make the reader care more, if that makes any sense. For example, you say we have a low proficiency, but don't provide any information on the severity of this. So I understand that you needed to set up how the public education system is flawed. However you spend way too much time on how the public school system is flawed if you are just going to move onto charter schools. You need to condense the information on public schools, but still keep it in there. You could honestly just make a paragraph on how American students aren't proficient, and it especially skewed towards those in a lower socio economic situation. Say the other alternative is private schools, but again is it not a viable option because of financial considerations and then go into how governments are following the idea of private schools, but they are charter and then boom go into the charter school defined section.
Additionally, the charter school defined section and those after are very jumpy. I see how you are trying to show the gap in the literature but the way you present it makes everything seem contradictory. I think this need a little bit of playing around with and reorganizing.
You need more justification on why Arizona and a better transition into your question.
Methods: This section you are especially wordy and not straightforward. As I stated in the overall section be straightforward. Be purposeful with your words. Your intro can be cut tremendously. You had some weird openings to paragraphs that were not necessary. This section is also vague in parts.
You also need some sources for the surveys, interviews, and observations sections because it sounds like you made all of this up. The only thing really cited in this section is what you are doing and the coding sheet.
Results: Honestly, it sounds like you were just like this sounds fine for preforming a thematic analysis, sources please. Additionally, I need more info on how you found the themes (is it based on previous literature, did you use a LIWC?).
To cut down on words, you do not need to keep saying "After (in depth clause on the thing you just stated in the last sentence)", you can say simple "After" "Next"
There are many times I commented that things were to wordy and I couldn't even understand what you were saying cause you kept talking in circles and not getting to the point quickly.
Also, a lot of your results I think belongs in your methods section. You explain way too many things you did instead of just the results in this section. Plus, you need a lot of sources in this section and methods.
There needs to be examples for your seven themes to build credibility. Also did you do any validity checks?
Discussion: You literally repeat everything for the intro, which is a page. Cut things please and make less wordy. YOu dont need to keep restating everything.
You need sources please for the love of god substantiate your points.
The entire discussion section is wordy please prioritize. Also I agree with daphne, is the standardized test portion important? You also need to be more specific with the limitations and future research.
also like you never really show how the school you are looking at is so great, provide reasoning please
ReplyDeleteHey Brian!
ReplyDeleteI focused most of my attention on trying to cut down your word count, so all of my notes on that can me found in the copy of your paper that I made (and the more specific comments are there as well). I think the biggest thing that I found in your paper was that you restated the same idea several times, which added a lot to your word count. I tried to fix as much of that as I could find, but definitely read through everything again and try to synthesize some of your sentences. Regarding your lit review, I think you had a lot of really interesting information, but I don't know if all of it was completely necessary. It was slightly overwhelming at times, because in some places, it seems like you focused more on stating facts than you did on connecting ideas. I really did like how you defined charter schools, though, and how you established your significance.
In your methods, I think you need to provide a little more of a justification of each of the methods you used at the beginning of the paragraphs that you discuss them in. This'll help clear up confusion. In your results, you provide a brief overview of the data you collected, but you never really provide direct quotes or statistics. This reduces the impact of your argument. Finally, your discussion was insanely wordy and confusing. I think that if you build up your results section, it should be easier for you to draw from the data that you've found there to simplify the way you're describing your ideas.
Hang in there, we're almost to the end!