Learning Outcome: Contributing Knowledge

When I was going into this class, this was something that was relatively new to me. In other writing courses, students are often asked to cite sources, to use what others have said, but that is different from what is happening here. I think the meaning of this outcome is you able to take primary research, in conjunction with what others have said, and extract truth from it. In doing so you are asked to be the judge, the voice of reason, not a student of to the side but the teacher on stage. You're not just citing sources, you're becoming one. It's a new load of responsibility, as just piecing together the conclusions of others won't work. You have to look at the world and draw them yourself. That is what I feel I did for these assignments. When I was going into my research project, there wasn't really a paper of my type that had been done before. So that meant that when I was analyzing my comments, I had to go in mostly blind as to how I would do it. I had sources, yes, but applying them for a paper like this is a task of its own. Regardless, that is exactly I did for my results section, though it may have taken a lot of time. I waded through tons of comments about NFL draft prospects, extracted information from them, determined patterns, and overall made sense of them. I was not entirely easy. With the types of comments I was analyzing, can get really complex. People can put tons of ideas into very few words, knowingly or not. It took a lot of thought a mapping of the conversation in my head to even get to what I have now. It is something I had kind of done before in my own mind but never put properly down on paper. Regardless, after a lot of work I did it and I hope that section scores well. For my discussion section, I did something similar, expect now I was to elaborate on what I had previously said and determine what it all meant. Once again, I was asked to be a judge of sorts, expect now was commenting on what we should do as a result of what I discovered. If you go and read what I wrote, I even gave some advice to NFL fans as to how to avoid some of the pitfalls other fans fall into. Thinking back on it, it felt kind of strange writing that part, as that is something I had almost never done in other English classes. I wasn't just contributing information, I was contributing a directive, an outlook. I was writing something, that if listened to, would affect people to some degree. Someone who reads what I wrote might disagree with me all they want, but that is what I was asked to do for this course. Thinking back, this wasn't the easiest outcome, but it wasn't insanely hard either. Humans naturally make judgement on all sorts of things, even if it's only for themselves. So for me, it was just a matter of putting what I thought down on paper. For example, it was easy for me to write about the NFL draft because it's not the first time I had thought about it. Even with that being said, the number of complexities and work needed for a paper as big as mine made it a whole different monster. It is project I probably would have had a very hard time doing only a year ago. Fortunately, that is what this course is for. My professor and all of the things we did in class helped me a lot in specifically this area. I probably won't do much if anything similar to this in the future, but I think I can still say that out of all of the outcomes, this was one I definitely grew in.