And I’m scooped. My project was published in another organism yesterday. Fuck me.
Just want to add that I’ve been working really hard to finish some experiments and we are beginning to write our manuscript now. Sometimes these things work out.
Do you want a guide to writing a research paper but you don’t want to scroll a mile on your dash? This post is for you, buddy.
This book (book????) or tidily-laid-out-shitpost or whatever you want to call it is a handy-dandy guide to college-level humanities research methods and paper-writing.
This is a step-by-step follow along of my process as I, a person with a BA in English Lit, navigate writing a paper on George Orwell for my English 101 class.
This is NOT carefully crafted, it is literally a post that I made.
That said, it is a post that I made that is twelve thousand words on how to write a paper and now comes with a table of contents and headers and fancy alt-text and image descriptions and is forty fucking pages.
This document includes:
How to read an academic paper
How to skim a book for a college class
How to prioritize what sources to use
How to write an organized, cohesive research paper with an introduction, support paragraphs, and conclusion
(i managed to only say “fuck” six times in forty pages so I’m not taking them out.)
Free to use for any reason, free to reproduce, give them to whoever, just don’t sell them. (if you want to credit me if you do share them, ms-demeanor.tumblr.com is perfectly fine)
Happy finals season, babes. Good luck with those papers.
This article offers a preliminary investigation into what I term “selfies of ill health” and traces the expansion of the autopathographic genre in visual media from professional art photography to the vernacular selfie in recent years. In this context, the word autopathography is used to describe self-representational practices that offer a first-person perspective on experiences of illness or hospitalization. I first situate the genre by identifying several typologies of selfies of ill health, including diagnostic selfies, cautionary selfies, and treatment impact selfies. I then focus on the forms of identity performance that selfies, and selfies of ill health in particular, deploy. I argue that the performative qualities of certain selfies of ill health overlap with salient characteristics of autopathographic practice in the arts. Using Karolyn Gehrig’s #HospitalGlam series as a case study, I examine how autopathographic selfies can also construct a politicized dramaturgy of the lived body, notably by enabling individuals like Gehrig to “come out” as being invisibly ill. I conclude that the dramaturgical thrust of such autopathographic imagery is to convey both the centrality of medical experiences in subjects’ lives and their specific desire to be publicly identified as persons living with illness. In light of this, although selfies of ill health may have opened up new avenues for autopathographic practice thanks to the affordances of social media, their communicative intents remain consistent with those of earlier forms of autopathographic photography.
That reminds me of that one infuriating post that was like “if you don’t understand an academic paper, it probably means it was poorly written”…. Besties, romans, countrymen, if you don’t understand an academic paper it’s probably because it was written for a handful of experts in the very specific subfield for which it is relevant, and as someone who is almost certainly NOT one of those handful of experts it’s not in your realm of immediate comprehension. In many (most? all?) fields if you take even one step to the left of your scope of research you’re going to end up spending a lot of time catching up on context. Shockingly, this is because there’s a lot of information out there in the world, and you don’t know all of it. That doesn’t make you stupid, or the author stupid. No one has to be stupid in this scenario. This is a process called learning, just chill on it
This is such a weird argument to me because like, there is no single answer here. SOME academic papers are written in a way that makes perfect sense only if you’ve studied the field extensively. And SOME academic papers are written by absolute dickheads who make everything maddeningly obtuse for no reason at all so that it’s a huge slog even for people who HAVE studied the field extensively. It just DEPENDS???
But if you want to be able to tell the difference: Using technical terms for field-specific things is good and normal. Describing complex or abstract ideas is good and normal. Replacing every ten cent word with a two dollar word, using labyrinthine sentence structures, or coming up with NEW terms for every concept or redefining old terms so they mean something completely different now, are all signs that your author is a dickweed.
