Chapter 17 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

Chapter 17 of Mike Palmquist's book, The bedford Researcher, is broken down into two different sections. One, revising your document by assessing how well it responds to a specific writing situation and two, editing your document through evaluation and improvement of expressions of information, ideas, and arguments in your paper. Palmquist says that when revising your document focus on considering your writing situation; considering your argument and ideas; considering your use and integration of sources; considering the structure and organization or your document; and considering the genre and design. As for strategies when revising your paper Palmquist recommends saving multiple drafts; highlighting your main point, reason, and evidence; challenging your assumptions; scan, outline, and map your document well; and finally, ask for feedback from a number of people. The second half of chapter 17 is about what to focus on when editing your document and what strategies to use when editing. Things like accuracy; economy; consistency; style; spelling; grammar; and punctuation are all key points to focus on, while reading carefully; marking and searching your document; using spelling, grammar, and style tools with caution; and again, like revising, ask for feedback are all strategies to help you edit your paper.

Chapter 13 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

Mike Palmquist, in chapter 13 of his book The Bedford Researcher, describes organizing, both the organization of your argument and your document itself. He goes over which organizing patterns you should choose; how you can arrange your argument; and how you can create an outline. What organizing patterns should you use is the first thing Palmquist talks in detail about. He says you can do one, or more, of the following patterns, chronology; description; definition; cause/effect; process explanation; pro/con; multiple perspectives; comparison/contrast; strengths/weaknesses; costs/benefits; and finally, problem/solution. No matter which of these you pick Palmquist also says that your pattern choice will reflect your role and purpose as a writer in your argument and paper. In the next part of chapter 13, what Palmquist goes over is how you can arrange your argument. He says that Labeling your evidence; grouping your evidence; using clustering; and using mapping are all strategic ways of presenting your argument, and will down the road help you even more with your outline. The last part of the chapter is about how you can create an outline. Basically there are two different types of outlines, informal and formal, Palmquist takes a bit to describe them but they are fairly straight forward. He also mentions that outlines are extremely helpful when you get to the drafting stage of your paper. In general, all of these organizing tools fit and work really well together, which helps you do your job of writing your paper.

Chapter 19 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

In chapter 19 of The Bedford Researcher Mike Palmquist describes in detail all of the different elements of designing documents and presentations. He goes through the different designs of different types of documents and presentations, things like academic essays, multimodal essays, articles, web sites, oral presentations, multimedia presentations, and poster presentations. Some of the steps of designing these are the same so in this summary I'm only going to cover the steps about designing academic essays since that is something I am currently working on. The first thing Palmquist says to do is consider your purpose. According to Palmquist, it use to be that most academic essays were very bland when it came to color, image usage, borders, as so on; but with almost everyone's ability to access to word processing technology, academic essays have become a bit flasher and can even include video clips and sound files. Palmquist's says that the next step is to consider the readers' expectations about design. In most cases academic essays are written for an instructor so it s best to follow your instructor's guidance when it comes to margins, font, etc... The last step Palmquist gives for academic essays design is to ask your instructor for a sample essay. By viewing someone else's work you can get an idea of what you instructor expects and some inspiration for your paper.

Chapter 18 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

Chapter 18 of Mike Palmquist's The Bedford Researcher, is all about how you can use design effectively and what design elements you can use. Palmquist starts off with how to understand design principles, including balance, emphasis, placement, repetition, and consistency; design for your readers by organization, recognizing function, and location of information and ideas; designing with a purpose; and design to address genre convictions. He also discusses what design elements you can use in your paper. Things like certain fonts, line spacing, and alignment are some of the most important elements a writer can use and should use; while, the use of page layout, colors, shading, borders, and rules (lines going either up and down or left to right on a page) are not as crucial to the writer. The writer's use of photographs, graphs, charts, tables, and other images or digital illustrations are great tools as long as you keep in mind that you need to use the illustration for a certain purpose; the placement near the text that it illustrates is crucial; and including a title or caption helps to explain the illustration. All in all, through out chapter 18 Palmquist makes a big deal about how your design will effect how your readers will react to and understand your paper.

Literature Review

Literature Review

Google is something that a lot, if not everyone uses from time to time, but not everyone knows the extent to which Google is creating new, exciting programs and technology that is a part of our daily lives. For example, Google is being used in the classroom for education purposes and even being used as a key part in our health, from programs to different health technologies. In a Formal Research Paper I’m writing for my English 102 class I will explore the topic of Google. Although we know that Google has been around for seventeen years, how, in the last ten years, has Google had a lasting impact on online health records? Why is Google Earth being used more and more in classrooms and how has it been helpful to education? Since Google Glass is a fairly new invention, how has this new technology changed our brains and us? Because of recent events could privacy changes to Google Health be beneficial? Google has been a big influencer and has changed many things since it first started; but, a few of those things have had very lasting impressions on people and not always in a good way. In doing research for this Formal Research Paper I have discovered that many of my sources fit into the following two categories: Google in Our Health (which includes Google technologies, Google Trends, Google Glass, and Google X) and Google in Our Education.

Google Health is discussed in a number of my topics. For example, Mike Adams’ "Review of Google Health - Technology Achievement or Privacy Disaster?" published on Naturalnews.com in May of 2008 was written the day Google Health came out, and it discusses some growing questions about this new program. These questions include: What measures are there to make sure that Google Health is secure? What guarantees are in place to ensure people's privacy when it comes to their health records? Adams answers these questions and talks about who is behind this “evil device.” I plan to use this article as a way to discuss the doubts about Google Health when it first came out. Like Adams, Janice H. Tanne published a peer reviewed journal article in 2008, around the time Google Health came out. Tanne’s work, titled, “Fears over Security as Google Launches Free Electronic Health Records Service for Patients,” was published in the British Medical Journal and discusses some of the aspects and features of Google Health; a few growing concerns that people have had; and what a couple of experts and surveys have to say about Google Health. Again, like Adams, I plan to use the information from this article to discuss the doubts and ideas about Google Health when it was brand new. Unlike Tanne and Adams, Michael R. Kidd’s peer reviewed journal, “Personal Electronic Health Records: MySpace or HealthSpace?”, from the British Medical Journal doesn’t discuss Google Health directly. Published in 2008, Kidd’s article is about two online healthcare websites being set up and tried out in England. The Summary Healthcare Record and HealthSpace, both of which are comparable to Google Health. This article also talks about some of the pros and cons of these two health record systems. Unfortunately, I don’t think at this point I will use this article in my final paper, but I’ll still keep it around for the information.

The first three sources I have were all published closely after Google Health came out; however, my next source is a blog post from googleblog.blogspot.com, "A Google Health update," that Google wrote in 2010 when the company realized that they weren’t doing so well. The blog post that Google posted, two years after coming out with Google Health, was in regard to some updates that were made to improve Google Health. In this post Google said that they have been listening to your (the consumer’s) concerns, and that they have updated the personalization options; how easily you can track your fitness goals and progress; and new design and features to help you act on your goals. I’m not sure in my plan to use this blog post exactly, other than citing it for information on Google Health’s features and aspects. I have another source that is a blog post from googleblog.blogspot.com; yet, this post announces some sad news. "An Update on Google Health And Google PowerMeter" which was published on June 24th, 2011, was written when two major Google projects were shut down. The first, Google Health, and second, Google PowerMeter. In their post Google lists out the different reasons why they shut both of these programs down put ultimately saying that it was due to wanting to focus their time and energy elsewhere. I plan to use this article in my paper to help explain exactly why Google Health ended and I may talk about Google PowerMeter a bit.

Quickly after the announcement of Google Health’s termination was the publishing of articles written about Google Health and what happened, here are four online web site sources written about how and why Google Health failed. The first is, John Moore’s article, “Stepping in Where Google Health Left Off,” published on July 6th, 2011 on thehealthcareblog.com. This article discusses the demise of Google Health and the rise of a new online medical record competitor, Cerner. This article dives into where and how Google Health went wrong, and Cerner’s plan to avoid the same fate by going completely different routes and learning from others, mainly Google Health’s, mistakes. I plan to use this article as a way to talk about what happened to Google Health and why. The second of these articles is Rich Whalley’s, “Google Health is Dead, Long Live Google+,” which, just like Moore, was published on thehealthcareblog.com in July 2011. In this online web site source, which contains a discussion about Google Health’s demise, Whalley evaluates other health gadgets and devices to see if they are headed down the same path as Google Health. He talks about what went wrong with Google Health; why it went wrong; if others are going down the same path; and where is Google+ in all of this mess. Like the last source, I plan to use this article in my paper to help explain exactly why Google Health ended. My third online web site source was written in July of 2011 as well. Carey Goldberg’s "What Killed Google Health? And What Does Its Untimely Demise Mean?", from commonhealth.wbur.org, discusses the mistakes that Google Health made, including privacy issues and not being well established. It also answers some common questions, such as if it was just too early for it’s time and kind of unnecessary. I plan to use this article by taking some of the questions in it and using them in my paper to provoke thought and make an argument. My fourth and final source about Google Health’s end is titled, “A Technology in Search of a Market.” This is Moore’s work again and it was published on thehealthcareblog.com on Aug. 5th, 2011. In this online web site article Moore (a lot like his last work) discusses the how and why online health record systems and online healthcare have failed. He mentions Google Health along with Dossia, which is another online health record system that is trying to reboot so to speak. As said previously, I plan to use this article as a way to discuss what happened to Google Health and why it failed.

This next source serves two purposes, it discusses not only Google health like my previous sources but it discusses my next category as well; which is Google Technologies. David Shaywitz’s online web site article titled, "Google Co-Founders: 'Thanks, But No Thanks,'" publish on thehealthcareblog.com, on  July 8th 2014 discusses an interview, with Google’s co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, on why Google isn’t going to do any more health related projects (like Google Health) other than a few special technology projects here and there. It contains some challenges that Google and other companies have faced with health related projects and why Google is going to stay out of them. I plan to use the interview in this article along with the information on why Google isn’t doing any more health related projects.

Like I said before my next category is Google Technologies. I have a quite a few sources that are all in the category of Google Technologies, these sources talk about inventions such as, Google Trends, Google Glass, and Google X. The first of these sources is a peer reviewed journal titled, “Google Trends: A Web-Based Tool for Real-Time Surveillance of Disease Outbreaks,” which was written by Herman A. Carneiro and Eleftherios Mylonakis. This article was published in 2009 in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal and it describes the use of Google Flu Trends which is a tool used to track the outbreak of diseases and epidemics based on Google searches. According to the journal this tool has become so popular that the CDC (Center for Disease Control) has been using it to track influenza outbreaks in the United States. Herman Carneiro, and his colleague, in this article discusses the pros and cons of Google Flu Trends and also gives a behind the scenes look on how it works and is being used. I plan to incorporate this work in to my paper through displaying how Google has been a huge help in tracking what’s going on around us. Like my previous source, this second source is another peer reviewed journal article that goes over Google Trends; however this article is a bit more general than the first one. Nuti Sudhakar and other authors wrote, “The Use of Google Trends in Health Care Research: A Systematic Review,” for the journal PLoS ONE in 2014. In this peer reviewed journal source the authors are discussing the use of Google Trends technology to help track health related phenomena, things like patterns of diseases and influenza outbreaks. This article also describes some of the pros and cons of using Google Trends to track these health related things. I plan to use this article in my paper to show the benefits Google Trends.

The second Google Technology I’d like to discuss is Google Glass, which my next three sources talk about not just the pros and cons but how it can be a useful tool as well. The first source is titled, "Google Glass in the Clinical Setting," which was published on dignityhealth.org, and is an online web site article about Google Glass. It contains a few interviews, and some great data regarding the use of Google Glass to help in a healthcare setting. It talks about how Google Glass gives Doctors more one on one time with their patients, which helps them to enjoy their work and in turn they enjoy seeing and helping people more. I plan to use this article as a support for the argument that Google has done a lot of good things in the last ten years, this being one of them, and also describe some aspects of Google Glass. My second source is Todd Wasserman’s, "What Will Google Glass Do to Our Brains?" published on Mashable.com on April 17th, 2013. In this online web site article Wasserman describes some arising possible issues from wearing Google Glass. Things like, health implications and our attention spans could all get negatively impacted because of Google Glass. Wasserman also describes the Roseto effect, which he thinks could occur less with the use of Google Glass. I plan to use this article to showcase some of Google Glasses cons. My final source about Google Glass is called, “Optimal Visualization Aids and Temporal Framing for New Products,” written by Min Zhao, Darren W. Dahl, and Steve Hoeffler. In this peer reviewed journal article, which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2014, Min, Darren, and Steve discuss how if someone is buying a new product from you lots of very detailed visualization aids are everything when it comes to actually selling a person the product or even just leaving a lasting impression. The example they use in this article is Google Glass. I plan to use this article as an example of the benefits of Google Glass.

My final Google Technology is something called Google X and I only found one article on it but it’s definitely one of my favorite articles thus far. Written by Leo Kelion, and James Gallagher, "Google is Developing Cancer and Heart Attack Detector," is a web site article that is really one of the most interesting in my opinion. Published on bbc.com on October 28th, 2014, it’s an article about Google X and how it’s working on developing a wrist band and nanoparticles technology that will be used to detect cancer, strokes, and diseases even earlier than we can detect them right now. This article simply goes into how it will hopefully work. I plan to use this article in my paper as proof for some great things Google has done recently.

My third and final category is Google in Our education, which I have three sources on and they are all peer reviewed journal articles. The first of these is Eva Dodsworth, and Andrew Nicholson’s “Academic Uses of Google Earth and Google Maps in a Library Setting,” which was written in 2012 for the Information Technology & Libraries journal. In this peer reviewed journal the authors talk about Google Earth and Google Maps being used more and more in academic institutions. The growing use of these tools has impacted the way people answer research questions; teach using teaching aids; and how they do marketing and advertising. This article shows that impact through data and research. I don’t really have a specific plan to use this article in my paper but I may use some of the data from it. My second source is actually a published school science lesson that uses Google Earth. Laura Guertin, and Sara Neville’s “Utilizing Google Earth to Teach Students about Global Oil Spill Disasters,” published for the Science Activities journal in 2011, is a peer reviewed journal in which students learn about oil spills and their effects using Google Earth. Like I said before it’s a school lesson but this is the great thing about it because it talks about and is some proof on how Google Earth is useful in the academic setting. I plan to use this article as examples for showing benefits of Google Earth. My third and final source on Google in Our Education is titled “Student-teachers’ use of Google Earth in problem-based geology learning.” It’s like the last source in how it discusses Google Earth in the classroom, but instead of it being a class lesson this article has data and in a sense more “proof” of Google Earth’s benefits in the classroom setting. Written by Ilkka Ratinen and Tuula Keinonen, for the International Research in Geographical & Environmental Education journal in 2011, this peer reviewed journal article examines how Google Earth can be used in a classroom setting to help educate students and increase their geographical thinking skills. The authors discuss some of the pros and cons when it comes to using Google Earth in the classroom setting and they have data on Google Earth as well. I plan to use the data this article and some of the pros and cons that the authors have said about Google Earth in my paper.

My last article of my entire Literature Review is one that applies to all of my categories equally so I thought I would put it at as the very last thing. Dean Giustini’s “How Google Is Changing Medicine: A Medical Portal Is The Logical Next Step,” is a peer reviewed journal article, published in the British Medical Journal, about the powerful impact of Google. According to the article’s author, Google is the top search website; the way that most people do research instead of going to the library; and now how people are diagnose themselves and even worse each other, instead of seeing a healthcare professional. This article also addresses some of those impacts and implies that Google is not all that. I will use this article to demonstrate Google’s impact and what Google has done recently.

Chapter 12 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

In chapter 12 of Mike Palmquist's book, The Bedford Researcher, Palmquist discuses how to develop your argument. The first half of the chapter is on how you can support your thesis statement by choosing reasons; selecting evidence to support your reasons; and deciding how to appeal to your readers. Something that Palmquist really emphasizes is appealing to your readers, you accomplish this through appeals to authority; appeals to emotion; appeals to principles, values, and beliefs; appeals to character; and appeals to logic, which includes deduction and induction. In the second half of chapter 12 Palmquist goes through how you can assess the integrity of your argument through the use of checking for fallacies based on distraction; looking for fallacies based on questionable assumptions; searching for fallacies based on misrepresentation; and locating fallacies based on careless reasoning. Within each of these fallacies categories is fallacies subcategories. Things like a red herring, stacking the deck, sweeping generalizations, non sequiturs, and circular reasoning are just to name a few of the way writers can get caught up in the integrity of their argument.

Chapter 11 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

Mike Palmquist, in chapter 11 of his book The Bedford Researcher, describes the process of developing your thesis statement by reviewing your position statement; reviewing your notes; considering you purpose and role; reflecting on your readers; identifying important information, ideas, and arguments associated with your position; drafting alternative thesis statements; considering the type of document you're planing to write; and finally, focusing your thesis statement. This all sounds like a lot just for one little sentence in your whole paper but as Palmquist says, "Your thesis statement provides a clear, focused expression of the main point you want to make. It is, in a nutshell, the most important idea or argument you want to convey to your readers." (203-204) The two main things that Palmquist really emphasizes is that, one, you really want to use the stuff you already have to your advantage. All of the key things you've come across in your readings will be of major help, for example all of the ideas and arguments you've come across while reading, will be very important when moving on to Palmquist's next main point. Second, when drafting your thesis statement try many different things. Try different writing styles, different genres, and different types of thesis statements. All of this will help you out when writing your thesis statement.

Chapter 16 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

Writing with style is what chapter 16 of The Bedford Researcher, written by Mike Palmquist, is all about. Palmquist goes over how to write with style and how to polish that style in this, fairly short but pack full of information, chapter. He states that the key to writing with style is writing concisely, using active and passive voice effectively, adopting a consistent point of view, and choosing your words carefully. Writing concisely means you remove any unnecessary modifiers, remove unnecessary introductory phrases, and eliminate stock phrases. Adopting a consistent point of view means that you use either first, second, or third person and don't change sporadically. Choosing your words carefully includes your formality, specialized language, and variety. Palmquist gives six different things you can do to polish your writing style. One, vary your sentence structure by using simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex clauses. Two, create effective transitions with words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Three, introduce other authors effectively, which we talked about in chapter 15. Four, avoid sexist language, for example, "A race car driver needs a fast car if he wants to win." Five, consult a good handbook so you can continue to polish the details of your style. Finally, number six, read widely. This one is the easiest and most fun do to.

Chapter 15 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

In chapter 15 of Mike Palmquist's The Bedford Researcher, he describes how to use your sources effectively. The chapter is divided in to three different parts, the first being using sources to accomplish your purposes as a writer, secondly, how to integrate sources in to your draft, and finally how to document your sources. Palmquist discusses how using your sources, like quotations, paraphrases, summaries (like this), numerical information, and illustrations can be helpful when introducing an idea or argument; contrasting ideas or arguments; providing evidence for your argument; aligning your argument with an authority; defining a concept, illustrating a process, or clarifying a statement; setting a mood; providing an example; and when amplifying or qualifying a point. He also talks about one of the ways to integrate sources in to your draft through quoting them strategically, by using partial, complete, and block quotations; modifying quotations; and punctuating quotations correctly you effectively get your point across to your readers a make a powerful impact at the same time. The last thing that Palmquist really focuses on is how to document sources in your paper. By choosing a certain documentation system; providing in text references and publication information; checking for unattributed sources in your document; and distinguishing between your ideas and your source you can make sure you aren't plagiarizing and you are achieving your writing purpose for this paper.