What I got out of the Peer Review

I am glad that I had the peer review before the draft, because my reviewer helped me catch some syntax errors and weird phrases, and also gave good feedback on content. You know who you are, so if you're reading this, thank you!
I love doing peer reviews myself and often help my friends out with their school papers or creative writing. I especially love helping to edit poetry and give criticism on them. I think it helps my own writing too, because seeing what other people do can give me ideas on things to avoid, and things to include. One thing I don't like is editing my own papers sometimes, go figure. However, I'll take editing over writing some days.

What I would do differently

I have a boatload of suggestions for past-me on this topic. For one, as soon as you find a source that looks relatively good, cite it!! You can always get rid of it later, but digging for it is going to be a pain. And also, start your annotated bibliography as soon as possible and start adding notes to your cited sources right after you read the source. Add keywords in your annotations, so that when its time to do the research paper, you can ctrl+F to find which source you need quickly. Cause trust me, you won't be able to remember every single source and what it covered!
Another thing I would do differently would be to find a consistent way of keeping notes. For whatever reason, post-its work best for me. I tried to change this system half way through and take notes on a separate sheet of paper, but it just wasn't the same and I had trouble keeping organized.
Until next time,
Cheers.

How Well my Paper Turned Out

I think my final paper was my most successful paper I did in terms of writing, structure, and content. The issues from project 4 were addressed, as well as integrated successfully into project 5. MLA format was correctly used and cited (for once), grammatical errors were fixed in the final revision, and I expanded upon my new thesis.
My draft from this project was improved upon in a few ways. I added direct quotes from experts for the definitions portion of the paper, and better explained how it related to the film.
In my draft, I had issues with adding irrelevant details in the scenes and cutting out important dialogue. I refined my scenes more and added dialogue quotations after watching the movie scenes again.

The final revision went over the word requirement by 450 words, and maybe I should have cut it back a little. But overall I think this paper was a success!

Writing the Draft

Writing the draft was about ten times easier than writing the definitions paper. But the reason it was easy was because I wrote the definitions paper first. I mean it was required to be written in that order, but I do remember thinking during the definitions paper, "How on earth am I going to apply this to the movie in a way that makes a bit of sense?"

To answer my naive question, pretty easily.

Once more I had to plop myself on the la-z-boy rocker and watch Iron Man 2 clips and repeat a number of scenes until I had them burned into the back of my mind. I'm pretty sure I can quote the entirety of the scene with Rhodes and Tony in Tony's workshop by now.

One problem I had while writing the draft (and panicking briefly as a result) was that I realized one of the scenes I thought was good was not enough to work with. I might have mentioned the plane scene with Tony and Pepper being one of my scenes, but yeah, that didn't work out. I did however mention it as a third, brief example in my paper.

I found the perfect scene with Tony and Vanko in the prison, so after that things went pretty smooth.

Until later,
cheers!

Another Source

Let's get right into it.


Shame and Pride by Donald Nathanson was a terrific source for the shame portion of my essay (obviously.)  But I think what helped me best to understand the book was reading a journal article by Jeff Elison (et al.) titled "Shame-Focused Coping: An Empirical Study of the Compass of Shame."  The writers showed the connection between Nathanson's and Tomkins's theories about shame and its affects.  The summaries in it on the compass of shame were very nice, and I'm glad I found this source through one of the sample papers posted for the class. 

Seriously, note to all future eng.102 students: the sample papers have some hidden gold in them. I think I found one other good source this way too, but I can't for the life of me remember. 

One final note: I think I might want to read Nathanson's book all the way through some day. Just not a week away from finals. 

Revised Thesis

I like how I keep saying I'm going to follow up with a topic for my next entry and never do it, and instead have a random assortment of entries vaguely linked together.

(Just kidding, I don't like that. What can one do?)

I'm going to talk about my revised thesis here today. In my last post discussing it, I said it was disjointed and needed to be more concise and hard hitting.

Here it is.

"The arc reactor and the Iron Man suit itself are Tony Stark's attempts to hide his impairment from everyone, including himself."

Badda bing badda boom. Not only does it present the movie in a broader sense than before, it was relatively easy to adapt to my paper. What I also like about it is that it's not only Iron Man 2 that it applies to, because I watched the first and third Iron Man movies recently and they were still applicable. (Moreso the first one, though.) If I ever had to expand this analysis, I would totally analyze all three films with this thesis and how Stark's character remains true to this, and how it differs.

Maybe I'll write more on it in another entry, but no promises!

The Most Important Source

Sometimes, in a research project, you come across that one book. You know the one I'm talking about. It's the one source that seems like a light shining in darkness when you previously had encountered only fragments of useful information.

That one book for me was the Disability Studies Reader. I think why I liked it so much was because before reading sections of it, I didn't really understand disability studies beyond the surface level. It also had expert authors featured in it, like Goffman that I talked about last entry, and Simi Linton who is a prominent writer in disability studies.

I think this was my best source by far, and contained a lot of quotable material.

That's all I have for now, so until next time, cheers.

Describing a Source: Stigma according to Erving Goffman

Alternative title: What shall I say about Goffman?

First of all, and this is completely irrelevant, but who names their kid Erving with the last name Goffman? Just saying it I can feel my tongue get caught up in the back of my throat. Granted the guy was born in the 20's, but still.

Anyway.

One of my sources that has been exceptionally useful is Erving Goffman's book, Stigma. He wrote about the different types of stigmas, and more importantly defined and explained the reasons for it.
I originally found the work in a compilation, called the Disability Studies Reader. I ended up not needing much more out of the complete Stigma book, and found all I needed in that compilation. What was also nice was the next chapter in the Reader went into more detail off of Goffman's work. Basically it was the best thing ever to find when you're doing a compare and contrast.

Anyway, I'll discuss another source in my next entry.
Cheers!

"Current" Working Thesis

Note on this entry: I revised my thesis after my conference, but this was my original thinking from my first thesis.

"Tony Stark passes as being fully able-bodied because of his fear of being stigmatized, or otherwise no longer controlling his own image.  He reacts by using the shame script of avoidance to cope with the fact that he is dying."

It was a little shaky on the wording but overall I think it was a good working thesis. The problem with it is that it is a little too direct. It did help me plot out exactly what I wanted to say in the paper, though. Now of course that sounds pretty redundant, but I've written more abstract theses before and had a bass ackwards paper as a result.

Anyway, next entry I'll talk about my revised thesis.
Cheers!

After My Conference

Today I had my conference with Dr. Lorde on project 5. I was the first one to go up, which was very nice for me since I was in and out within fifteen minutes. I had some errands to run around campus, which I'm glad because if I had just left, I would have forgotten to give one of the other students his peer review I did last class.

I was surprised on how well my conference went. I was especially glad that I did the definitions portion of the essay correctly, because that was what I felt like I had the most trouble doing. All I need to do is polish it up and refine what I said to match my thesis a little better, which means focusing the paper more overtly in disability studies.

This was actually something I noticed too, because I felt like I needed to rope in all of the definitions to be part of the bigger picture.  Additionally I need to change "nonvisible" to "hidden" disability for terminology purposes.

As far as the analysis, I picked good scenes and I am glad that they worked as well as they did. The only changes I need to make are to cut out the irrelevant bits of scenery described, and quote more of the dialogue directly rather than paraphrasing. I also need to explain facial expressions in a more analytical manner, such as "his eyes were downcast and his mouth seemed to droop down into a frown," rather than something like "he looked upset." I need to include any relevant sounds or music in the background too, if there are any.

Now I'm curious if I missed something in those scenes I've watched fifty times over.

The little things I'll be changing are those irritating "I will do x" and "I believe x" phrases that I wrote in to state my opinion. I put them in there to sound like some of the "They say/I Say" formats, but I did it in a way that was too blunt. I'll be changing them out for something more flowing, like "The point is that x" as suggested. I'll also fix the MLA in-text citations to be (Author 15) instead of (Author, 15). That'll teach me for going to a friend instead of google.


Finally, I'll be changing my thesis wording a bit, and creating an introduction that introduces the scene of Tony describing his iron man suit as a prosthesis.


For once this week and despite being sick with a cold again, everything's coming up Sabrina.