Brainstorming American Sign Language Assignment

Throughout this past semester, I realized, very quickly, that research was much different from what I first envisioned. I was used to writing different research papers with a predetermined topic or question. Teachers always told us what they wanted to see and what we were supposed to include in our papers. The research was also very simplistic in that we just had to address the what the topic meant, without really having to give our own insights in the paper. So, having to pick our own topic and ask a question that really has never been answered before, was very different. I know I had a lot of trouble finally deciding on a topic purely because I had no idea where to start. I think that might have been the hardest part of the whole project.

I achieved this outcome through the Brainstorming Audit assignment. The first topic and question I chose were not what I decided to conduct my research on. In the assignment, we had to write reasons why we chose that topic and what problem or question that we thought of in relation to it. I wanted to write about why American Sign Language is not really accessible in schools. I wrote about how I saw it as a problem because of the many children and adults who need to learn, but may not be able to. Once I started to research the question, however, it was difficult to find studies and journals that contributed to the conversation. Thus leading me to change my topic. Even though I did not submit a new Brainstorming Audit for my new topic, I still had to go through the same process as before. I needed to research different studies and journals, while also reading conversations in my new topic’s discourse community. I had to repeat what I had already previously done, in order to have the knowledge of what I needed to write about and show that I understand what I am talking about. This assignment was not the only one that allowed me to achieve this outcome. Almost every assignment and paper we wrote in this class had to be revised and thought about in different ways. Writing is messy because we all constantly adding new ideas and concepts to make

I used outside sources such as print and electronic studies and journals to discover, create, and retrieve information to have the knowledge of the discussions in my discourse community. This was presented in my Framing Synthesis, which connected all of the research and studies that were in the bibliography itself. While writing this I had to refer to all of my sources and find common ideas, results, and outcomes to draw conclusions. The Framing Synthesis only had to do with the sources in the bibliography, so my own thoughts were not included. I had to discover and find the thoughts and results of others. The second part of this assignment was the Annotated Bibliography. This allowed me to demonstrate my efficiency in documenting sources and using the information from them to draw knowledgeable conclusions. The Annotated Bibliography had to contain at least twenty academic sources and popular news articles. Because my topic and question called for more opinionated responses, a lot of the articles I had researched were popular news articles, instead of academic sources. I then gave a two-hundred-word summary of every article. This process was very long and very tedious but was so helpful when it came time to write our final research paper. While writing the research paper I was able to look back at this