The topic is really interesting to me, but I'm beginning to worry that I'm going to have to focus on less interesting aspects of it because the interesting bits are kind of all over the place. I'm actually kind of stressing out a bit about it. Also, I'm pretty confident that I'm not going to find anything that will change my mind, so it feels a bit self-serving to just keep finding things that confirm what I already know. For me, there's nothing worse than just trying to add things to a paper to get it up to the required length, which is how I worry it's going to go. In other papers I've done, I've generally had to trim things to get them down to length, but this is I think the longest I've done, and I'm really worried that a focused topic won't really fill it. I also suspect that I'm not going to be able to answer the question that I find most interesting. (Is the relationship between distrust of science and trust in alternative medicines a causal link? Does a rise in one cause a rise in the other?)
So what started out as a paper of discovery is kind of becoming a paper that's just me finding things to back up the opinions I already have, and I'm not terribly happy about that. Hopefully once I really get started on the writing things will make more sense, and I'll lead myself down roads that end up in discovery. As it is now, I'm not terribly good at looking for information without a real focus. I can find a bunch of links and sources, but it's not really until I start getting it put together that the data becomes useful for me. Then I start to know what else to look for and things just go from there. I hope.
This kind of paper is pretty new to me, though I have done much smaller versions of the same sort of thing over the last few years for fun on my blog. I hope I can sort of take what I'd learned from that medium of writing and apply to to the somewhat more rigid format of this particular paper. One area that really troubles me, though, is citing sources. In a blog it's relatively easy because it's easy to link sections of text directly to their sources, and even present quoted material inside blockquote elements, leaving almost no risk of plagiarism at all. I really am having trouble with quoting snippets of text, or even summarizing them as part of the body of my text without completely ruining the flow. As I read other people's papers, the quoted sections are almost always really painful to read, because it's really tricky to incorporate another person's voice into the flow of yours. Hopefully that'll work itself out, too. I don't have a problem with a works cited page, it's just actually referring to the works in my work that's giving me trouble. Any suggestions for help in that area would be much appreciated.
Does anyone (Gail?) have any particularly good examples of passages where people have directly quoted (or even paraphrased) sections of other people's works that fit well into the flow of the author's work? I can't recall seeing any -- but I suspect it's like good score in a film; if you notice it, it's because it's not good. Great scores are almost never noticed, because they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do by making you feel something without realizing you're being manipulated. Anyway, I hope I can crib some technique from somewhere, so anywhere you can point me would also be appreciated.
