Learning Outcome: Generating Inquiry

Generating Inquiry: One of the first things I learned when I started this class was the meaning of exigence. It was a word I had not heard before, but the definition is fairly simple. It is essentially why you are writing something. Humans never write just for the sake of it, they are always responding to something.  Obviously, given the countless topics people can write about, people care about and thus respond to different things. I think this ties into what I did with my research project. When I was introduced to it, I was given literally no guidelines on what to write about. So long as it could be answered through the analysis of online comments, I could write about it. As a result I came up with a research question practically no one had asked before. I think that's what it means by generating inquiry. Can you take what you care about, your exigence, and turn it into a question you can answer and a goal you can get to. I think generating questions is something natural to humans, so I think even before coming into this course, generating inquiry was something I already knew how to do, at least at a fundamental level. However when it comes to doing that in an academic context, doing it for a research paper or whatever else it may be, I had not really done something like that before. I think the research project is the assignment that helped me most with this, but there are likely many others that did as well.