Reflections on Academic Writing

After being out of the higher learning sphere for nearly a decade, it did take a bit of time to hit my stride as an academic writer. It is probably more accurate to say that I have not yet hit it, but am stumbling toward the straight direct line that such writing requires. In my writing for LRNT 521, I had a tendency to wax poetic in my blog posts, and be more philosophical in my writing. I suppose I had hoped to distil some profound understanding of the world of e-learning networks that no one had ever considered in quite the same way I had. Ultimately, I discovered, I was mostly rambling along the same lines as everyone else. It is hard to be original. It is more difficult still to be a quality content creator. I found the feedback from my various cohort members and my instructor for LRNT 521, Elizabeth Childs, to be especially helpful and encouraging in the development of my writing. My cohorts because of their complimentary comments on my blog posts, and Elizabeth because of her pointed critique of my academic assignments that both pointed out strengths and highlighted areas for growth in a way that made complete sense, and I hope from assignment 3 to 1, made for slight improvements to some aspects of my writing. Writing is a journey, and in just nine weeks I honestly do feel like I have come a long way.

My biggest area of growth is a bit ironic, because I tell my most common feedback to my high school student’s writing is, you need to explain what this demonstrates, or why it is important: why is Hamlet’s suicidal state of mind of particular importance to this scene? How do you know this? In short, like my students, i need to be better at synthesising information,m not just parroting what is already written. Thinking is hard. My success in the first course would suggest that I am on the right track, but I have high expectations, and do want to wind up as at least a quasi-expert on some aspect of e-learning.

One aspect of academic writing that I hadn’t considered in my undergrad was the quality of my sources. A history professor once flagged me from drawing to heavily from one source, and that has stuck with me. I am now hyper-sensitive to having a variety of sources in my bibliography, and during my undergrad this was largely just to give the appearance of a well researched paper. I have grown here already, because everything I have cited, for the most part, I have read in its entirety. However, this does not mean that what I have cited is meaningful. This is a goal I have set for myself in this course: to learn how to effectively disseminate the vast sloth of information that is available on any given subject.

Finally, APA a style which I abhorred in my undergrad and avoided at all costs when given the choice in favour of (in my view) the more logical Chicago citation style. So, to help me navigate the mandated use of APA for my writings in this course, I have been looking at a variety of applications and extensions to help manage my research and ensure that I cite it correctly. I have heard about ref-works, but it seems to require a subscription so I have been working with two chrome extensions: the Google Scholar button, and Colwiz. I discovered the Google Scholar button early on and found it useful for quickly citing whatever article I happened to be reviewing, and it was a decent browser tool for online scholarly publications as well, I even went to the length of making an instructional video for its use. I did find that the Google Scholar Button did not provide the full range of citation information that I might need, which is what has lead me to experimenting with Colwiz. It is early days with this application, but it looks to be an academic version of Google Drive, with a citation manager built in. The fact that it was developed by Oxford researchers certainly is promising!