Resaerch

[pixeldrift]

Trying to teach my students how to do a proper research paper has inspired me. I realized how much I actually miss the process, almost to the degree where I wish I was back in school and asked to do one. Maybe because I know I was really darn good at it

Comments

[krikketgirl]

Wow, you're even geekier than I am! I love doing the research, but I hate writing the papers!

[pixeldrift]

It's a really nifty subject. I'm a graphic designer with a strong background in writing and English, so it's a perfect combination to do something on word recognition. It's also very cool how much context plays a part, in the sense that your brain reads much faster with casual writing because certain words, phrases and letter combinations are so common that they are anticpiated and safely ignored. The mind automatically fills in the gaps so your eyes are free to rush along to more important sections of text. Yay cognitive neuroscience!

I'm tying together stuff about digraphs, ligatures, subvocalization in sight reading, phonics, dyslexia, parallel letter recognition, and the famous "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch" meme. All because I ran across this snippet:

[virtuouswife]

I have no idea what you're talking about. LOL. But I also love research papers and the process of writing them. In college, I was like, "What? Only 5 pages? Where are the 20 page research papers?" The longest one I ever had to write was 12 (as an english major!) but I loved it. The longer, the better - more research, more learning, more writing.

[pixeldrift]

Yeah, even in high school we had 500 word papers assigned that were due the next day. I think our final term paper was a 12 pager though.

I was fairly unchallenged when I got to College Comp. In fact, I was able to resubmit many of my high school papers with hardly any adjustments. :) I just found some of my HS papers when going through some old boxes, and immediately noticed things that my teachers didn't catch in proofreading them.

[virtuouswife]

Oh... and just because the human eye can recognize words where the first and last letter are accurate and the rest are scrambled does NOT negate the need for accurate spelling. :P

[pixeldrift]

Exactly, which is actually partly what the research shows. Even though the forms are recognizable, people DO slow down when reading misspelled words. I had a really hard time with Huck Finn. I was a pretty quick reader in school but as soon as I hit his phonetic dialects, I slowed WAY down because I had to switch to sounding it out.

Also, those studies revealed that it's not just about having the first and last letters correct, it matters a lot WHICH letters are swapped and by how many spaces. You can scramble the internal letters of your own passage and it will come out totally unreadable. That classic example only works so well because it was very carefully crafted to be readable on purpose.

[acrobartman]

If you're so into research, come to grad school! Lots of reading and writing here!!

[pixeldrift]

Yeah, kinda need an undergrad first... :P Besides, they would make me write about other stuff, not things I'm necessarily interested in.

[anonymous]

Geek.

But I do like looking up info on things, but HATE writing.

--Erica