BOOM! 4,996 words of pure perfection. 4,996 words of brilliance. 4,996 words of sleepless nights. 4,996 words of blood and tears. Ok—maybe not the last one—but the other three are definitely spot on. Anyways, my paper is so beautiful, so perfect, that I really don’t see any point in writing this blogpost. But, if I don’t write a blogpost, Mrs. Haag would kill me. I am still young and have a bright future ahead, so, I guess I just have to find something wrong with my paper. Well that’ll be hard.
I like to start with the bad news first. It took me a very long time to find the following flaws and weaknesses in my paper, so please bear with me here. I believe my biggest flaws to be in my results and discussion. I have included a lot of information into my results section, detailing every single manifestation of the different overall thematic differences between dubbed and subtitled anime. I fear that the amount of information that I included is overwhelming and confusing. If I were to provide a visual representation in my results, it would most likely be a table consisting of the different themes and their sub-themes/manifestations. But I do not even know if the table will be useful or more hurtful if I include it in my paper.
Regarding my discussion section, I am not sure if I properly answered my question. It is not that I didn’t answer my question, it's more whether or not the way I answered my question in my discussion section is actually easy to understand. I especially need feedback on my “Answering the Question” section of my discussion section.
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| So close yet so far. |
Now onto the parts of my paper that are good: all the parts that are not bad. Jk. Jk. Jk. I’ll take this seriously now. I think that the strongest parts of my paper are in my literature review and my methods. Obviously these parts of my paper are the strongest because they are the ones that I have been working on the longest and I have edited the most. My strong parts in my literature review are in how I introduce my academic gap for my question and also how I provide the context for the academic gap.
In all seriousness, my paper definitely needs a lot of workshopping—especially our two more recent sections. These next few weeks editing the paper will be a critical and hard task. But, we are almost there and only one more month until we are done.
Word count: 428
Hi Gursajan,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your paper, the literature review has some gaps in the justifications. Sometimes I found the paper missing warrants in their justifications and heavily relying upon the author's credentials instead of their justifications. But the overall methodology and results sections were well done! The discussion did interact with the results, but as you feared there is not enough cohesion near the end of the discussion to properly answer your question.
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Ashwath V.
Ashwath, thank you for your feedback.
DeleteAfter meeting with Mrs. Haag, the same problems that you mentioned came up in my discussion and results section. I will be restructuring my entire discussion and results sections to adress the concerns that you bring up.
Hey Gursajan!
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I want to commend you on finishing your paper and all the research! Not even joking -- I absolutely LOVED reading the examples in your paper. They were really cool and showed me a lot about your research process. Also, your results corresponding well with what is in the literature about Japan vs the US culturally is super impressive.
Ok now for the critique --
Generally, you make a few stylistic errors over and over, which were most notably ending paragraphs with quotes or evidence, using the phrase "for example" 29034890328490248 times, missing hyphens, and comma splices. Moreover, as Ashwath pointed out, you rest a lot on the credibility of others without a lot of conversation with the methods of the source. This would elevate a lot of your claims.
The literature review had a problem of unsubstantiated claims and detached explanations from their claims. For example, your claim that the change in the sensitivity of American cartoons led directly to the increased popularity of anime in America needed more support and sources in my opinion. I can think of a few counter examples (Family Guy, the Simpsons, SNL, etc.). Can you expand upon this? Additionally, I think you could move up the part about the prevalence of anime because I asked about that earlier. I also think you could articulate the significance of your research better and more clearly (i.e., microcosm of the transfer of media and products from one culture to another). Also do you have a hypothesis or no?
The methods were too reliant on sources I felt at times, especially when you talked about the steps of a thematic analysis... you were basically summarizing a source there. Moreover, the question arises why don't you do a thematic analysis followed by a content analysis I think. So address this. I get that sample you chose was important historically, but you need to convince me that this sample is the perfect sample that is sufficient to answer your question. I liked the other parts of the methods though.
In your results, you need to portray the themes in some sort of a diagram. There is no transition between headers so I'm just very confused what they are for. It's really easy to get lost in the themes because they just go in order and are not really conversed at all with each other. That's the major problem there.
Your discussion comes together nicely with Japan v US, but at several points you talk about the prevalence of certain themes, yet you did not provide us with any quantitative data. I can't just trust you on this. So you need to give us the quantitative scores or whatever in your results and reference __% percent more in your discussion. Your limitations section should talk about theme vs content analysis again by the way. And finally you're missing the punchy last closing part of your paper... it sorts of ends in a shrug instead of a nice summing up.
Hope this feedback wasn't too anime-ted for you ;)
Yash 🦁
(514)
P.S. I put the feedback doc for your paper in your Completed Assignment folder, so check that out!
DeleteYash bae, thx for the feedback. I'll try to adress some of the big things that you mentioned in your comment.
DeleteFirst Mrs Haag gave me a crash course on how to use punctuation so hopefully I have learned my lesson there After having my meeting with Mrs Haag I know how terrible my usage of punctuation is and I will be going back to carefully read through my paper to make my punctuation better At the same time after reading my paper I have realized that I also had very repetitive language where I am really redundant and I say the same thing over and over again and it makes it more confusing and I need to go back and change that thing too I know that it makes my very confusing when I am redundant and repetitive
Regarding your concerns about the literature review and methods, I will go back to look at the concerns. Some of those problems you talk about, such as the counter-examples to my claim on the loss of complexity of cartoons in America, can be addressed if I make my claims in my lit. review clearer and more specific.
I did think about including a diagram in my results and my discussion section but I decided against it because I thought it would make my results and discussion more confusing. I am currently restructuring my results so hopefully I will be able to add the diagram. Also, your concern about my lack of data on the prevalence of themes in my discussion section came up with my meeting with Mrs. Haag. I will be redoing my discussion section too.
Overall, thx. for all the feedback, and I will do my best to adress all your concerns.