What is "research"? Research is looking for information, research is experimenting, research is expanding knowledge. What if that research is misunderstood or misguided to simply doing homework, searching for online information? Well then it is no longer "research." When "research" becomes nothing but simply copying and pasting information online and calling it original work, that is plagiarism. In Professor Joseph Longhany's course, we spent time understanding how to conduct real research on subject that we (as the students) find interesting. Unlike most English courses where the professor is the one assigning the literary works, Professor Longhany granted us the opportunity to explore our own interest. Instead of researching online literature, basically copying the reviews of others online for assignments, Professor Longhany's assignments are one that we can freely choose to conduct for our self. During Professor Longhany's course, we had one assignment; to research what we find most interesting, what we, as the students, want to know more about, solely base on our interests. We could have researched about anything, from Justin Bieber to researching about the development of medicine or the world privacy and corruption of the government.
For me, I did research on the hidden messages that our bodies convey, not through words but through the motion and the movement of our body and facial expressions. The topic is purely my own interest. I was able to conduct my own research that fits me best. During the research process, we have to collect information and conduct our own experiments to further enhance our research. My research focused on the facial expression and the body language and how we can understand a person's state of emotion. I did numerous research on past experiments relating to my topic and further elaborated on what I found through analysis of each past research. Furthermore, I also research on past scholars who have done similar reviews about my topics. However, unlike my past English written assignments where simply looking up information and basically copying them is fine, Professor Longhany asked us to approach our research in a different way.
During the research, I did numerous write ups, planning out my initial questions and revising constantly. Professor Longhany gives us plenty of time to have us write a first draft, after which he read and gave us feedback. Professor Longhany's feedback was really helpful in rewriting. I was able look at my feedback, see the mistakes I have made and the careless grammar mistakes that I overlooked. Researching for Professor Longhany's course, I was able to reflect my own interest in the project, planning and rewriting was a big part of the research. Of course, that involved planning my time wisely. I needed enough time to do the first draft of the paper, with enough time to rewrite for more context and improvement. Most importantly, I have learn how to do proper "research."
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