Research Proposal Paper – A Reflection

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I’m circling back to gain insights and reflect on the product I’ve achieved from the DS2 research proposal assignment. Just as I’ve done for previous academic writing, I’ve published sections here on my blog and then used the links to conduct a visualization using Voyant Tools.

Here are the links to the research proposal in three parts, as well as the references:

  1. introduction and literature review
  2. purpose, question and method
  3. implications
  4. references

The word frequencies and key words:

Key words: research, education, teacher, educators, digital, literacies, OEPr, practices
Bubble lines for key words across three sections of the research proposal.

Evident from these two images is the topic of focus – teacher educators – and where I’ve applied the key terms throughout the paper. It’s interesting to see the larger bubbles at the beginning and ending of the sections of the paper, indicating an emphasis on ‘educators’ at these strategic locations in the paper.

Then I examined the density and sentence length, primarily to compare to previous writing I have analyzed [Visualizing My Essay].

This research proposal has fewer words and has less density, but has a similar range of words per sentence, when compared to a previously analyzed essay and previously analyzed blog posts. I think that the lower density is a result of the methods section where I am describing the research proposal, which requires fewer ‘zombified’ nominalization words [Understanding Terminology].

This is an interesting exercise to complete for this particular paper and gives me additional insight into my writing from a clinical, empirical viewpoint, showing me the data from my work, which I can compare to work I’m doing over time. I think I’ll continue using this resource to inform my writing practice.

The link to the Voyant tools results for this analysis is provided so a closer examination is possible.