Literarure Review

It is obvious that the Literature Review assignment changed our views on the topics we are all writing on. In my particular case, I realized there are many people all around the world that are very familiar with TED and are always ready to share their thoughts with others who have similar interests. Even though I could hardly find any books or articles in academic journals about TED, I got a lot of information regarding TED that I can use in my own research. Most of the information I found was from different periodicals and a variety of online posts. I also learned that blogs play an important role in our today’s information sharing. Because blogs represent the original author’s writings, reading them is the best way to understand what people really think about a particular topic.

Another helpful aspect of the assignment is learning to find similar ideas in absolutely different articles from different authors. Moreover, it helped us to mix them in a right way, avoiding plagiarizing and incorrect quoting.

In conclusion, there are tons of benefits that we got after writing the paper. Some of them were mentioned above. However, there are much more of them that I cannot even define because they kind of help us subconsciously. We will realize them during writing our next paper.

Topic Proposal

My experience with writing a topic proposal was quite interesting. That is because at the beginning I had no idea what it is. Thus, my first draft had nothing to do with the assignment. I wrote a kind of research paper, asking and answering questions I raised, which were imperfect as well though.

Another problem I had with it is language. I did not know whether it must be very formal or just like typical essay. I wanted it to be formal and used a lot of academic sources. However, the completed paper did not look appropriate, it seemed to be full of plagiarisms.

I figured out what the real topic proposal must look like only after another workshop. So, my final draft was absolutely different. It had more proper questions, and I did not answer them. I realized that all I needed to do is just raise questions supported with some ideas from different sources. That actually was much easier because I could use my own language and I did not have to be very academic and formal.

In conclusion, I can say that writing a topic proposal is quite fun. All you need to do is just keep asking different questions and not thinking about whether you know their answers or not. The only things you have to remember about are the adequacy and importance of the questions.

Workshop

I had my workshop last Friday and it was pretty helpful. I could see and understand all my mistakes that I hadn't seen before. Moreover, some new ideas came to my mind during that time, I had been spending hours just reviewing my essay without any usefulness though. The best point of the workshop is that we all had a chance to take a look at our papers from another fresh view. And we know that a fresh view can always find a lot of mistakes that looked right before.

One of this mistakes that became visible after workshop is that I didn't have an actual conclusion. Quite a serious thing, right? But if I didn't have a chance to review my paper together with the class in such a casual situation (I mean a meeting in Starbucks), I would submit my essay just the way it was.

Another workshop’s advantage is that we had an opportunity to check the essays of other students of the class. Only after reading critically those papers I could really judge mine, what instantly made me to rewrite some weak and inappropriate parts of the essay.

In other words, everybody needs at least one of this kind of meeting while working on his writing assignment. And it doesn’t matter how much time he spends on his essay, there are always mistakes that are hiding from him and can be easily determined during a joint workshop.