Greetings all,

            I am Lana; I enjoy copying quotes down on sticky notes, papers, calendars, and skin. In between the time that I am not sleeping, reading, or writing you will find me watching Slam Poetry, X Factor auditions, or TV shows. I major in Professional Writing and plan on entering the book stream because I find writing about people— creating characters— enjoyable.

          I am not too sure what I want to learn about research because I have been taught how to research academically and how to research for day to day knowledge at a young age. During my experience of academic research, I have and sometimes still, experience frustrations at a lack of finding a specific piece of information. Research becomes quiet tedious after hours of highlighting books, taking notes, going through Google searches, using Google scholar, and Refworks (I haven’t used Zotero before) to only finding an insufficient amount of information to back up an argument. At this point, I try to change key words in my search bar or I look at different sources. When that doesn't work I either change the subject of my paper or change the argument. I find that changing the argument to fit the information that I have already found can be useful and I end up not having wasted any time. On the other hand, my day to day research is a lot easier because I do not need to argue a point or site a source and Google tends to have most of the information I need.

My podcasting or radio experience is a total of nothing, unless listening to the radio counts. I do feel intimidated to do an episode partly because my relationship with technology is like my relationship with math; absolutely horrendous. I don’t understand some aspects of technology and the idea of recording my voice and having others listening to it isn’t my idea of fun. Other then technical issues, all I can do is use my research experience to help assist me in creating the podcast episode. In fact, I have Under the Influence and Lexicon Valley as potential topics. Under the Influence seems to be interesting because I love analyzing material. I blame it on my constant habit of close reading novels to find the implied meaning of a story. Although, analyzing advertisements might be a little different but I think I can make it work because I have looked at advertisements and their effects on culture in the past. I also like Lexicon Valley because of the sole reason that I love the way words sounds. I also believe that words can influence and change a culture so that would be fun to look more into. Other then that, I am excited to see what new knowledge and experiences I will gain from this class.