Task 2: Research Review & Proposal builds on the foundation laid in Task 1 by moving from identifying a research topic to engaging with existing scholarship and planning your own research study. It’s split into two key parts. In Part 1, you're asked to critically review a scholarly article connected to your topic. This pushes you to practice academic analysis—summarizing, evaluating, and responding to another writer’s work while considering audience, structure, and effectiveness. In Part 2, you're challenged to take ownership of your research by developing specific research questions and outlining how you would investigate them through primary research methods like interviews, observations, or textual analysis. Even though you won’t carry out the research, proposing it helps you understand how academic inquiry is planned and conducted. Overall, this task is meant to deepen your knowledge of writing studies, strengthen your analytical skills, and get you thinking like a scholar—asking smart questions, engaging with sources, and designing a study with purpose.
For Task #2, I approached things differently than I did for Task #1—I completed almost the entire assignment before submitting my draft. Because it was already close to being finished, I only had to make a few small adjustments before turning in the final version. That might explain why I didn’t receive any feedback from my peers; there wasn’t much to suggest or revise. I treated the draft more like a final product from the start, which made the revision process much quicker.
Between the draft and final version of Task #2, my thinking became more organized and focused, especially in how I connected my personal experience to broader academic goals. In the draft, I had most of the content written, but some ideas were still rough or underdeveloped—like my explanation of the article’s shortcomings and the full purpose of my proposed research. In revising, I refined how I evaluated the article by clarifying its strengths and weaknesses more critically, and I expanded on how linguistic relativity connects to writing studies. I also strengthened my research plan by clearly explaining how my methods—interviews and writing analysis—work together to explore my research questions. These revisions show how my understanding of academic writing improved: I moved from simply presenting information to building a clearer, more persuasive argument with specific purpose and structure. This final version represents how I’ve learned to shape my ideas more intentionally and to write with a sharper focus on audience, purpose, and clarity.