Blog #13 Taylor Wisnieski

Chapter 5 in the Pearson text is mostly about exploratory essays. The text also talks about annotated bibliographies and how they along with exploratory essays serve as an intermediate stage in the research process. While reading I found an important rule to writing exploratory essays, "The essential move for exploratory thinking and writing is to keep a problem alive through consideration of multiple solutions or points of view". This reminded me of when I had to write my exploratory essay and while writing it I had to search for many solutions to the problem at hand, I couldn't just have one solution because people would get bored with it then. Another important factor I found in writing an exploratory essay is, "The key to effective exploratory writing is to create a tension between alternative views". I found this significant because you can't just have one view towards the issue you are writing about, you have to show people that you are open to changing your opinion on it. It may be easy for a person to write just through their own opinion but it challenges the writer to look more in depth into the issue and allow themselves to maybe change their opinion after doing research.

While reading chapter 9 I found a couple of things that stuck out to me as they were talking about citation. The first thing that stuck out to me was when they were talking about attributive tag method. This is where you place the author's name at the beginning of what you are citing and the page number at the end. I think this is useful because you are citing while not having to follow the real guidelines to citing in a paper. The second thing that stuck out to me was, how to cite when there are 4 or more authors. I didn't know how to do this in the past so when I read about it I finally learned how to properly cite it. When you are citing 4 or more authors you put the first two authors then et al. afterwards.