Writing Discussion #2

For your second writing discussion, I want you to share items that you’ve found but realized you can’t use.

A really important part of writing is reading. And a really important part of reading is realizing that something you read taught you something but is not useful for your current project. (I also know that assignments have things like citation minimums and it can seem useful to force in some information because you read it; always make sure the information you’re including is useful for what you’re doing in your writing.)

I’m obviously a big proponent of keeping notes on things you’ve read because you never know when you might be able to use that source (perhaps another course). But I think that sharing things we’ve read can help us to find other resources. For this writing discussion, I’d like you to do the following:

You can use your experience from this course or others searching for articles on your project(s). Pick an academic article that you found and thought would be useful for a topic but, after reading over it, you realized it wasn’t useful. Please detail the following items:

1. A full citation of the article
2. A few sentences explaining why you thought it would be interesting (i.e. what did you think it’d be useful for you for), with attention to the key factors/issues of interest
3. A few sentences explaining why you realized it wasn’t as useful (maybe their case was different than you thought, it didn’t contain the variables you were especially interested in, it covered a different era than you’re focusing on, and so on).

and that’s it. As this forum fills up, come back and read over them to see if there are articles that may be useful for you in your own projects.