I am currently in the process of revising the draft of my ASMR project. Although I would love to have more data to draw more findings, I have ended the data collection process to focus on revisions. I have identified another theme or two that I didn’t originally include in my draft, but these largely support the conclusions I already made. I do think they will help explain the significance of my project a little more.
The feedback I received from the draft was invaluable. As I was writing, I found myself shifting focus from one idea to another too much, and the feedback is really helping me restructure the organization of my argument. The areas I am focusing on the most are the introduction and reframing my thesis to clearly communicate the purpose of this project and why it matters. I never made these points as explicit as I should have, and I realize this is very important for the structure of the rest of the paper (and for justifying the work I have done to this point). Also, I need to do a better job connecting my research questions to the literature and to the project’s purpose. They make sense in my head, but I know I didn’t communicate them on the page very well. I am also bringing in a bit more literature and incorporating better sign posting, especially in my lit review, to make a better synthesis of previous research and to aid in organization. Overall I am working on creating a more logical flow for the argument of the paper.
Peer reviewing another paper was also helpful in seeing how someone else approached the project. As I reviewed the other draft, I realized some areas where my draft was lacking. I had made notes of these that mirrored many of the notes I received as part of the feedback on my own paper. Writing these research papers is an iterative process, and I find myself clarifying my own thinking each time I revise. It also forces me to answer some of the harder questions that I had tried to avoid earlier in the research process. I plan to take the lessons learned from this to apply to subsequent research projects and to clarify the big issues like significance and project purpose more explicitly at the beginning of the research process, rather than trying to justify them retroactively. It’s not that I didn’t have a plan or concept of these, but I would have benefitted from actually writing the introduction prior to conducting the interviews and textual analysis. I think this would have helped keep the project more focused.