General Forum Chat Thread (I) [ARCHIVED] • Page 198

tbqh i have mostly had trouble staying under word limits than meeting requirements

 

I do not envy anyone writing papers right now

 

That was always my case if the topic was interesting enough to take personal value in the subject. Otherwise, I scrapped by with word count.

 

My mom bought me one of those and I never used it. I am truly the laziest.

 

i can cram papers real easy. unfortunately in my major there's very little essay writing. i cram for exams much worse haha

 

I feel like research papers should be phased out at this point. I could very well be wrong, but I was taught that research papers are supposed to be more other peoples' words than your own. So you're just compiling data. Which made sense to me for pre-internet world, but at this point when the internet is as vast as it is, I feel like it's kind of dated.

 

I mean, I'm a history major, research papers are essential

 

That's fair. I guess the context I was being asked to write them for didn't make sense to me. I also recognize it might be a bad opinion haha

 

i mean the closest I came to writing a paper was functional documentation for software. i do really appreciate how people can write big papers. it's a great skill imo. i wish i was better at it but thems the breaks I guess.

 

i did make a dope pan seared steak for dinner tho soooo...

 

political science and sociology (my majors) papers are pretty necessary. demonstrating an understanding of the subject and its connections is critical. if theres something that should be different its citation methods. apa, mls, apsa, chicago - all terrible, inconsistent, impossible to manage systems that were built decades before the internet. i think there should be a way to cite directly via hyperlink or something at this point.

 

I agree with that. Citations were always a pain in the ass.

And just to be clear, I wasn't doing some "down with essays" chant or anything haha. I just never understood the format of research papers.

 

i was going to do sociology before i settled on compsci (big change I know) and I don't think i would have survived it. fair do's.

 

My AP English teacher wanted us to reword quotes in our own words but then would call us out for plagiarism. She was a terrible teacher lol I had always used MLA until I got into forensic science and then everything was APA.

 

sociology is great! i almost wish it was my primary major before poli sci. took soooo many sick classes my last couple of years, even if just being active on the internet and focusing on social and identity politics meant it was mainly serving as a way to reinforce what i had already learned.

theyre by far my least favorite part of academic writing.

yeah i get that. it varies, some papers arent necessary if youre just rehashing what other people have said and quoting massive blocks of text. various clas disciplines definitely make it necessary. my last semester i wrote a 20 something page research paper about environmental racism and while i drew heavily from other peoples work its still a topic that is absurdly underresearched and underreported and a portion of my paper ended up arguing that we need to be paying more attention to it and working to fix it because people dont know what the fuck youre talking about when you say "environmental racism" and then less than a year later we have this whole flint crisis. but ive also written research papers that were basically boiled down to "i read this book, here's some quotes to prove it"

 

ok that's understandable, and i'm sorry you're going through that. we are just ok with paying more for food because we rarely spend elsewhere. since i don't really get to see anyone, i don't really go to movies, or concerts (it's been 2 years since a show) anymore and rarely eat outside (it's been months), and i'm constantly trading in my games so i don't have to pay full price for getting more of them. it's just originally there was no context to your previous post, which is probably why we were confused. so again, sorry bout that.

also, i didn't address this before but you had said much earlier that you actually think people who are fussy with food are "unadventurous elsewhere" which not only makes very little sense, it is a very broad and generalized statement (which is upsetting to see people actually think that way of others, without giving them a chance). sorry about bringing that up again, just wanted to get that out of the way.

 

my senior project took me two months to even figure out before i got down to writing. it was FUN!!!

 

What the fuck haha. Having bad teachers is the worst.

Yeah any research paper I was asked to do was "spit back information you found and then tell me where to find it". That's more the situation I was talking about. It just doesn't make sense to me to do something like that when I can just e-mail you the list of articles.

 

sweet. i probably wouldn't have been in a place to excel at it when I was going to go into that line but I can't help but think what would have been different if i stuck to my guns about it.

 

we've been in that situation before, so i definitely have been on the other side of being able to spend more for food. it's just a bit of a rough patch for the last few years, but we'll still get through. yeah, there wasn't much context to that post, but when you're the one on food stamps, you typically don't like to lead with that. i've been that person at grocery stores when they see the WIC card they're like "so why do you have an iPhone then?" i live really frugally, but i also budget like a champ to make sure i still am able to do things to respect my mental health (i've got quite a few concerts lined up this summer, and my family pretty much exclusively gives me gift cards for my birthday/holidays to the movies so i can get out every now and then).

again, the interest of brevity led to the implication that i don't give people a chance. i never said that, nor do i believe that people who aren't adventurous in food can't be adventurous in life. far from it. but for the majority of the people in life i meet like that, it is a parallel that holds up. especially in the area of the country i live in/most of my close and extended family. and i also think this may have been accidentally implied that "adventurous elsewhere" was in regards to sex, when that wasn't the case either. i lived abroad for 9 months (see how then switching to a food stamp life would be so difficult?) and i still have people who can't fathom that in my daily life because i didn't have daily access to mcdonald's.

you didn't really have any context to think i was narrow-minded, or to know why i would make these sorts of statements. in the interest of fostering the community we want, instead of reactionary statements like "yikes" or "to bring this up again" like it's been bothering you for days, just ask a few questions. that's how we eliminate misunderstandings. engage, don't react. that's in response to you, but kinda direct to all the people who are gonna lurk!read this, too. we're all talking about fostering this community, and i think that could be a really easy way to grow and learn new perspectives. engage thoughtfully, not react. especially over things like this. there's a time and place for big reactions, like the better off incident for a this week moment, but we're also setting up places to engage for those incidents so that we can maintain a level of thoughtfulness abandoned on AP.

so, sorry if i came off in any way offensive, i didn't mean it in that way. but i also didn't say anything that couldn't have been clarified quickly instead of judged. so yeah, my name's Garrett, my family is currently on food stamps which restricts a lot of life, but i'm still trying to be healthy and take care of myself. i live near a lot of people who aren't adventurous in food or life. that's what's shaped me and why i made those statements.

 

Ayyy bought passes for this last night. What's good beyond The National, Robyn, DIIV, Bully and Charles Bradley?

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.ne...531_957699147653939_3654775975892197952_o.png

Toronto also got another fest announced today with The Cure, Tame Impala, Grimes, Jamie xx, Daughter and some other stuff. So now that I can see Tame Impala I've got everything but Animal Collective ticked off my festival 2016 wish list.

 

So was I!

Now I work in Accounts Payable.

 

To add to the on-going discussion: I was an English major. I averaged two research papers a week for four years.

 

I started as a Forensic Chemistry major for 2 years then switched to Accounting for the final 2 years and I think I had a total of maybe 2 research papers my entire college career. Unless we're counting college courses taken in HS, then it's alot more.

 

The thought of this just made my brain short circuit