Scholarly Conference Abstracts Necessarily Engw33

Annotated Bib Intro

Annotated Bibliography/Conference Abstract/Research Synthesis | 15/10/25%

Learning Outcomes:At the end of this module, you will be able to:

•Identify an area of inquiry and research that is relevant to your field.

•Distinguish between scholarly and professional writing.

•Succinctly, accurately, and faithfully summarize, paraphrase, and cite your discipline’s scholarly writing.

•Locate and analyze scholarly sources related to your inquiry question.

•Generate a research proposal.

•Create a bibliography that meets your discipline’s academic and scholarly needs.

•Articulate a research interest in scholarly terms.

Due Monday July 15, by 11:59pm:

Read the Annotated Bibliography assignment sheet and watch the appropriate video lecture. Post any questions to the Course Q+A thread.

Inquiry Question. Think back to your preliminary bibliography and the research that went into it: what are some topics that interest you in your field? What are some issues that come up around this topic? What are some questions you have about it? Try to come up with a question (or a few questions) to help direct your research for the semester. Try to make them not so broad that you don’t have a focus, but not so narrow that you can’t find anything. You will likely find you need to continue to narrow your focus down the more you work on it, so a willingness to evolve with an idea is an important characteristic to keep in mind. The foundation you start to build will sustain your research and writing for the next several weeks, so give time and thought to this process and really consider something you are interested in, a topic that gives you room to explore, analyze, and question.

At this juncture, it’s important to consider not just your own interests, but also how your interests are written about by scholars in your field. For instance, you might be interestedin gene therapy, but the scholarly writing on it might be well beyond your comprehension and, frankly, uninteresting to you. So, consider both what you wantto read, and what you’re ableto read. While part of this course’s challenge is reading texts beyond your comfort zone, you do need to be able to make sense of at least part of it. Lastly, while Module 1 focused on howscholarly writers write for other scholars, we’re now shifting focus to whatscholarly writers are writing.

You might find it helpful to think about this task in terms of keywords and indexed terms from your sources: the jargon of your field, in other words. If you’re unsure as to which keywords or concepts really structure your field’s critical discourse, you might consider copying and pasting the body text of your sources into Voyant. Remember, what you paste into Voyant doesn’t have to make sense; this means that you can make long plaintext file of all your sources’ body text and see what ideas, methods, problems, and values appear most frequently. You might find a surprising shared value or widespread method, aside from author identified keywords, that invites further research. Although it is not required, I encourage you to use text analysis to argue for the importance of your inquiry question. Why should someone else in your field care about your inquiry question? Text analysis should help you answer that question.

After revisiting your preliminary bibliography, write a long paragraph (and post it to the appropriate BB Discussion Board thread) in which you narrow the focus and specify your questions. Do be careful about topics commonly associated with the word “debate,” such as abortion or euthanasia. Those are issues of moral, ethical, or religious debate. In this class, we want to focus on the conversations taking places about the dominant issues in your field—that is, what is known or unknown about a topic or what the best approach to a problem is or best policy for dealing with an issue. For example, for a health/science writer interested in chronic disease and public health, one debate that is relevant and compelling is the oversight of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. Relevant questions to get that student started on researching this topic might include: When did DTC advertising become legal? What are potential benefits of DTC advertising to patients and doctors? What are potential drawbacks? How does cost factor? There are many more questions that could be asked, but you get the idea. Once you’ve got your topic, try to come up with as many questions about that topic as you can. Don’t worry about the structure or logic of the questions for now. Just try to think of as many as you can.

For this module, you will complete three high stakes (graded) assignments. However, these three assignments will all come about from your ongoing research process. Thus, while I will grade each assignment on its own merits, I encourage you to consider these three assignments as a scaffolded approach to research writing. Beginning with Module 2, you will research and write about one topic for the remainder of the course.

The annotated bibliography is exactly what it sounds like: a bibliography of sources, annotated for consideration during the project. As with any business-related bibliography, this one should contain the full APA style citation of each source. You should list sources in alphabetical order, according to the authors’ last names. Bibliographies must contain a minimum of six sources, no more than two sources from a single bounded collection. A single bounded collection – say, an issue of a scholarly journal – may serve as a single source (this will make more sense after you’ve completed Module 1). Collectively, your sources will form what’s called a knowledge front, which you’ll use to begin responding to a call-for-papers (CFP).

Once you’ve completed your annotated bibliography and conference abstract, you should be functionally literate, so to speak, in the language of your field. Accordingly, you’ll be positioned to analyze, draft, revise, and submit an abstract for a scholarly conference in your field. Researchers write conference abstracts to propose contributions to scholarly and professional conferences, gatherings where newly created knowledge is presented and discussed. Scholarly conference abstracts necessarily distill complex, academically relevant projects into short, bite-sized chunks of text, while the resulting papers explore a single idea and introduce it to an audience of peers. Thus, this module will require you to demonstrate both an understanding of what constitutes scholarly work, per se, and the genres of the conference abstract and paper. Think of this assignment as an elevator pitch version of your final project, but one that you have to write before you complete the entire project.

For your final scholarly writing assignment, you will extend the work of your conference abstract and use most of your sources from your annotated bibliography to write a short (5 page) research synthesis about a relevant, ongoing issue in your field. In the paper, you will demonstrate comprehension and application of key terms and concepts, synthesize research-based arguments and findings, critique existing approaches, and suggest either new research or policy to address your chosen issue. You will follow field appropriate citation and attribution practices and introduce visual and/or quantitative representations of your findings, as necessary.