If you are interested in following my progress, please look to my personal blog, which I am now using for my research writing, as well. It is at http://avonde.wordpress.com.
Thank you!
I finally received word back from the human subjects review committee, and my request was deemed “exempt,” which means I can move forward with my project interviews, and I won’t have any other hoops to jump through in the future (unless I change my plans, but dammit, I will not be doing that! I hope not, at least…).
Yay! Onward and upward, I say!
Proposal Accepted!
My proposal was accepted by Ann. Now it has to go through the program chair and the Graduate program director, and then I’ll be set. The first step was getting it OK’d by Ann. The project is going to be cake in comparison to writing the proposal!
Creating Interview Questions
I’m writing up the interview questions I’m going to submit to the Human Subjects Review Board for the interviews I’m going to conduct with the authors and editors, but all of the questions seem so trite and big:
Authors
Why did you start writing children’s nonfiction?
What do you need to know about children’s nonfiction publishing?
Who do you view as your audience?
Does that audience play a part in your writing process? If so, how?
If you were handed a resource on writing and publishing children’s nonfiction, what would you like to see covered in it?
(For experienced authors) When you first started writing children’s nonfiction, what questions did you have about…
the publishing process?
your audience?
how to write the book or series?
Editors
What do you look for when evaluating a new book or series?
What gets published under your watch? Why?
Do editors prefer query letters or a full manuscript for a book or series?
What is your publishing houses criteria for prospective authors? For prospective series or book?
What is your advice to new authors seeking to break into the field of children’s nonfiction?
I’m just not sure how to get my questions to stop leading to answers I’m looking for. That’s what I have so far. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Back At It
As you can see, I’m back to work on the proposal, and the project, really. It’s kind of hard to separate the two. When I’m researching for the proposal, I’m really researching for the project.
Once I get this proposal accepted, the project feels like it should be a breeze! The proposal has been so much work–it’s been 3 credits all on its own.
I’m hoping the project will come together more smoothly now that I have a clearer focus on my project question. I didn’t mention that we changed it to fit what I really was interested in? I’ll tell you that story in the next posting…after I get more of these resources saved. Cheers!
Ann Wysocki is hard to find
Well, at least her work is. I finally found the online, hyper-text version of “Monitoring order: Visual desire, the organization of web pages, and teaching the rules of design here, but I still can’t find “With Eyes That Think, and Compose, and Think: On Visual Rhetoric,” which I know was published in Teaching Writing With Computers: An Introduction by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian Huot. But I can’t get a hold of their book (unless I buy it, and I’m just too cheap/poor to do that when I’m not sure I will get any use out of the other articles). Halle Library doesn’t have it and neither do any of the hundreds of libraries in the MelCat system. *sigh*
Ann Wysocki, if you’re reading this, do you happen to have a copy of this article around? I would really like to include it in my literature review for my master’s project. Thanks.
P.S. I will be e-mailing her if I can’t find it in the next couple of days. I sure hope she doesn’t mind!
Backing Down
I am forbidden from directly working on my project proposal until after the holidays are up. Ann told me that I’m going to burn out soon, and we don’t need me throwing my laptop over the ledge here in my living area. Not good. So I’m backing off of it, but it’s going to get done soon after the New Year. I swear it.
Methodology & Me
I am absolutely and completely frightened of the Methodology section of my project proposal. I’ve worked on it a little, but Ann says it needs to be really detailed. What if I’m not even sure what I’m going to do to get to answer my question? What if I’ve skipped over revising and adding to this section the whole revision process and now am stuck doing it because I’m done with everything else?
Yeah. It’s going to be a long night.
Fightin’ the ?
I feel like I’m fighting against my question–not working with it. I think I might have to change it to fit what I’m finding and am most interested in. I don’t want to give in, but I also don’t want to be fighting with myself the whole time. That would lead to a very long research process indeed.
Self-Doubt Knocking at My Door
As I’m getting toward the actual work on the project, I’m starting to question myself. Am I ready for such an undertaking?
I know it’s only three credits, but it seems to be so much more than that. This is big. Really big. Bigger than anything I’ve done before.
I guess when it comes down to it, I wonder if I know enough to really write definitively about this subject. I have some experience from an internship this summer, a little work on it in a class last year, and a keen interest in children’s nonfiction publishing, but the vast majority of what I know I’ve read. What if I haven’t read enough? Eek! What frightening thought.
Ann says all researchers have self-doubt, especially when they’re writing about a subject they’re somewhat new to but are still fascinated with. I guess I’ll just have to see where this whole process takes me.
Oh, and I’ll be posting more now that I’ve got some of my work (somewhat) under control.
