1. Theory
I performed a fairly extensive search of Academic Search Premier, and the psychological databases via EBSCOhost. I also used Google and did a search on the ACT Library's website for any books on Rwanda or genocide. I found a lot of different theories, and critiques of theories on my searches. I then went through and tried to summarise the main findings which would relate to genocide, and apply these to my essay. I believe that I found most of the main theories, however some have been omitted mainly due to word count restraints. In many cases I had to omit theories because I judged a lack of relevance to my topic.
2. Research
As above, I performed fairly extensive searches through a variety of sources, though the most useful sources were the online journal articles. Many of the articles that I ended up using in my essay were written by those who were actually proposing the theories. There may have been some important research that I did not end up using, either because my search was not extensive enough or because I discarded research that I thought was not relevant, though upon deeper inspection, it may have been.
3. Written expression
Readability (from http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/resources/readability-score) follows:
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 29
Ideally, web page text should be around the 60 to 80 mark on this scale. The higher the score, the more readable the text.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 14
Ideally, web page text should be around the 6 to 7 mark on this scale. The lower the score, the more readable the text.
Gunning-Fog Index: 22
Ideally, web page text should be between 11 and 15 on this scale. The lower the score, the more readable the text. (Anything over 22 should be considered the equivalent of post-graduate level text).
Notes:
Average syllables per word: 1.87
Average words per sentence: 19.75
I am a little surprised by this, as I would have expected it to be a bit more readable. Next time I write an essay/blog I will run it through a readability analysis earlier in the process! I did not even know such a thing as a readability analysis existed until recently.
APA style:
I believe that the only part of the APA style that I did not follow, was in my use of headings. As far as I can remember, headings are not usually part of psychological essays. I have been using the book that was recommended back during first year psychology, about how to write psychological essays (The Principles of Writing in Psychology, T. R. Smyth). As far as I can tell, I have followed the guidelines provided by Smyth, completely.
Concept map:
As was required for this blog topic, I have developed a concept map using the online software MindMeister. As not only the idea of a concept map, but also the creation of one via a website such as MindMeister is rather new to me, I believe I did fairly well. Had I started thinking about the concept map earlier, and perhaps learnt more about concept maps, I would likely have presented a better concept map. I have seen other concept maps, and believe that mine does not quite compare with the better ones.
Blog layout and style:
I created my blog on blogger.com, using a simple white background with black text template. I had actually used a high contrast black background with white text template, but in the process of publishing this blog posting (Appendices) had trouble getting all the text readable (for some reason the black background wasn't showing black text very well!). As I am fairly new to blogs, I believe this represents a basic, but functional blog. It should be readable, if perhaps a little un-exciting.
4. Online engagement
The idea of online engagement is fairly new to me (as I imagine it is for many of my classmates) and as such took a little while to get used to. Due to the large amount of blog postings coming through, I found it difficult to keep up with, and comment on all the blogs I would have liked to. I am fairly happy with my own blog postings, as I believe whenever I had something to say on the subject, or whenever I discovered something particularly interesting, I created a blog post. I probably could have done more blog posts, and certainly could have commented more on other people's blogs.
Here is an example of my most recent blog post, which I believe shows that I was thinking about some of the issues involved in genocide.
1 comments:
Apologies for the problem with the very small fonts at the beginning of this post. I had some trouble getting this post to display correctly, I believe largely because I was copying from a Microsoft Word document (using fonts that Blogger.com does not seem to support). Hope it's readable anyway.
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