Chapter 6 & 7 blog

Chapter 6 is about conducting reader centered research. One of the more interesting guidelines from this chapter is the need to create an efficient and productive research plan. I must admit that I fall into the group of people that generally do research in an unorganized fashion. I can see from this chapter that I am likely missing some important resources. Further, it is probable that my research is taking longer than it should and it is less effective. Before doing additional research on my personal project I intend to make a plan so that I can consult the sources that will yield the best results. I would also like to get better at following guideline #6. This guideline directs you to take careful notes when doing research. Specifically recording the information about my resources for the bibliography would be most beneficial. I tend to do this at the end and it is usually difficult to do after the fact.

Chapter 7 is about using five reader centered research methods. When writing I have never really done brainstorming or freewriting. I was especially intrigued about the free writing. I can definitely see the advantage of letting my brain produce complete thoughts and worrying about organizing them later. It usually takes me a long time to write because I am trying to produce the best sentence structure with proper wording to convey my thoughts without freewriting. This I can see is something that has caused me to take longer writing my papers than maybe it should have.

I also do plenty of Internet research for either school or work. I was totally unaware of different organizations being assigned to specific domains. I must have wasted lots of time looking at websites that contained information that had questionable credibility. I would like to get better at using some of the search options such as the Boolean operators. In addition, I would like to get better at finding the necessary source information from a specific website for my bibliography. For me, this has been especially difficult. If anyone has some pointers on getting Internet resource information I would appretiate their input.