My Research Question 3/31/16

1) Why is this your topic of discovery?
My topic is the water quality of Lake Michigan, how it has changed over time, and how its quality is affecting the drinking water of Chicago now.

2) What question do you want to answer?
I want to understand how having the big city and all its industry next to Lake Michigan has affected the quality of the water? I want to know if the effect has been positive or negative? Have animals played a part in degrading the quality of the water or do they help? Has the city's presence affected what animal life revolves around the lake? Is there a way to revert any negative impact people have made or if the change is a positive one, is there a way to maintain and/or enhance that positive change?

3) Why this Question?
I live in Chicago and I know that even if the water still tastes good, there may or may not be something in the water that could make it harmful. I just want to know what kind of treatment the water is going through? Do we use it as a waste fill or do we actually take precautions that are effective in keeping the cleanliness of the lake.

4) What do you need to learn in order to answer this question?
I need to know history on water treatment plants procedures, big industry, near water's edge, procedure in dealing with waste,  efforts taken to revert water pollution, and their effectiveness.

5)
I need experts with specialties that include: marine biologists, biologists, chemists, and officials that deal with the movement of water around the city.

Review day 2 Explanatory Synthesis

Today I had a draft it was only about 400 words. It was the main ideas of each topic in order. I ordered my paper to first define stress, types of stress and varying effects of stress, defining introversion and extroversion, then bringing the paper together by combining all those topics to begin to give possible strategies of beating stress. Today's review didn't do anything for me. I was hoping for ideas on the topics in my paper or maybe what other topics I should include. All they could tell me was to add more information about the topics I already had. It was like "duh" I merely introduced the topics. In a 400 word draft for a paper that's supposed to be ~1500 words long it's obvious I need to add more information but that doesn't help me on how to develop my paper. They couldn't give me the depth I wanted from the review. It's my fault too, I guess I didn't give the reviewers too much to work with in the first place.

First review day for Explanatory Synthesis paper

Today I didn't have a draft ready so I didn't get any feedback. I reviewed Ryan's paper on the global water crisis. He had a really good paper. I could tell he had been putting time into doing a good job because you could see the effort in the paper. He had some small technical problems with APA style and passive voice. It was informative to a big issue that is going on.

Blogs on Review process (300+ words)

 This paper was difficult to start then I got advice from Dr. Wielgos. He helped me to get a good outline of how to transition from topic-to-topic. I refined my topic and put it into simpler words that would make for an easier writing process. My design plan was actually similar to the final paper. I feel as if I just had worded the original design plan weird because I took a long time for me to be able to get anything started but once I got help with transitioning my paper, it was clear how to move forward. I feel like the review process did not help me much this time around. All they could tell me was to add more information, like I didn’t already know that. It was not a full draft, it was the big main ideas of each topic. It just seemed like they just told me really obvious things that I already knew. My final paper was built well, I thought. It went through the topics as planned and actually accomplished my goal for the paper. My goal for the paper was to inform. The topic of my paper was stress and strategies to beat it. The important thing to note about stress was that it affects everyone differently. So I had to give people some kind of measure to compare themselves against so that they could begin to understand themselves before they go out and try to figure out how stress affects them. I don’t think it is possible for people to  figure out how something affects them without having some sort of understanding about themselves. It’s actually really simple addition. If you do (understanding of self) + (everything you learned about stress) = (effects of stress on you). When you acquire a self-understanding you figure out the parameters of who you are as a person and with that you can find where there are weaknesses and the soft spots where you are vulnerable to negativity, too much pressure, too much stress.