Paper Notes and Critique

Notes:

Preferred News Sources Notes:

·         Ab: A little bit more about the context of the research would be nice. You talk about the significance but not about any surrounding research/ lit. review material.

·         Ab: Can’t say, ‘because ….,’ your study doesn’t focus on why younger generations are turning to social media more. Instead say that your study suggests younger generations may be…

·         Intro: both the concepts of Agenda Setting and politicians come up early, but don’t seem to play a role in the research. I would early try to take that out or clarify that it’s just an example. The way you introduce and explain agenda setting makes me think that’s what the paper is going to be about.

·         Intro: second paragraph feels like it’s all quote and no content. I’d minimize the use of quotes and try to just explain the findings in a more significant way yourself.

·         Intro: I think you could definitely expand on the lit. review portion. Talk about the shifts, were you hypothesize it’s going, how your research question fits into it.

·         Intro: Also I think you could talk just a little bit more about why we need to look in to college age kids in particular. Is there a purpose besides the fact that we just haven’t yet?

·         Participants: I know I said this before but it’s just a little lacking. How’d you determine the participants? Why is so many demographics important? Why are most of them honors students? It seems like over explaining (in kind of is in my opinion) but go into that stuff a bit more.

·         Procedure: Similar to participants, good content but just feels lacking. I feel there’s definitely more you could go in depth with here.

·         Analysis: So you talk about the data, but what did you look at? What was most important here? I want to hear about not what the data was turned into, but how you went about interpreting it.

·         Methods: In general this section seems to hit most of the points that it needs to, but it just feels way to short and concise, to the point where I feel like you’re leaving out important parts of the process that the audience should know.

·         Methods: Generally you have a very cut and dry syntax. Although I know it’s not something that drastically needs to be fixed, I don’t think it’d hurt to play around with some more complicated sentence structure, just so it breaks up the monotony and makes it more interesting to read.

·         Results: I mean the kind of obvious thing is you need some actual writing to break up the graphs, for each graph you show, you should be talking about why you asked it, what it’s results were, and why those results are important.

·         Results: That being said, you don’t got to show us every single graph that you have. It’s interesting stuff, but you’re writing this report because you’re deciphering the data for us, not just giving the raw information to us.

·         Results: On top of that, you need to answer the original research question.

·         Results: Page 6 is blank?

·         Discussion: Again, avoid because. Think of media, if you didn’t run an experiment you can’t draw correlation. Besides, I don’t think that’s really the focus of the study anyway. Or, at the least, say, ‘this could be because…’

·         Discussion: I find myself asking, ‘how?’ a lot through this, but I think that’s mostly because you’re alluding to findings you didn’t talk about in the results. However, if you find yourself making a statement that isn’t based on info in the results section, make sure you clarify why you think that.

·         Discussion: Maybe just give like one or two more sentences on how future research could fix your current limitations. Besides that I think that’s a solid paragraph.

·         References and Appendix seem fine to me (which is more than I can say for my paper) so don’t worry about that any more.

General Comment:

Overall the piece feels very concise and packed with information, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It makes it so that every sentence feels like it has important info, and there's not really any parts that I feel need to be cut or heavily edited. That being said, it can feel relatively choppy and abrupt at points, and I think you do miss a couple of points through out the paper. In particular I think the end of the discussion was solid though, as well as the abstract.

As far as some of the biggest revisions that I think may be needed, I would have to start off with the results section. You have all the graphs you used in the research, but you really need some text to describe the graphs and provide some clearer context as far as the importance and meaning of the results. On top of that, the results section is supposed to show your think and provide a clear view of what exactly your process was. It's hard to give any more specific feedback than that, considering there's not much text to go off of.

Another point I'd hit on is the fact that you sort of say you got these results because college kids are migrating towards social media. You're study doesn't exactly draw any sort of correlation there, so that seems like a very assertive comment to make. I'd recommend editing that statement a bit so it's more passive, i.e., "the findings seem to suggest that this could be because of...".

The last major point, in my opinion, would be in the methods section. The whole part feels very brief and quick, and although avoiding meaningless info and length is a good skill for a piece like this, I feel that you took off a bit too much there. Not to mention that's where the uniformity of syntax and choppiness seems the most disruptive, so I think adding on to it a bit would really make a good impact.