Discussion 5

“Research Questions & Focusing Your Research”

Research question:
- How do golf-related open forums help spread information across the online golf
community?
- How does this online golf community enable its users to feel comfortable sharing their
opinions online?
I believe these two research questions help understand how writing is presented in the online
community because both questions are hitting key points of writing that take place in the
community. The first question is related to users putting out questions in hopes that they will
be heard and that they are able to receive responses from anyone in the online community.
The second question is related to how the people who run the online community ensure that
their users will be comfortable expressing themselves in the online community. For example,
what do the people in charge of the community say, and the measures that they put in place to
ensure the comfortableness of the users. As to the primary resources, I’ll plan on using, I am
leaning towards original documents such as using a forum that was posted on the online
community and the responses it received also who responded and how they responded. When
using this primary source, I am able to go and dad and explain in detail how effective the
writing in the online community is. I also plan on using the feedback that users in the online
community provide. Whether that be through the actual web page of the online community or
extensions into other social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram. Many of the users in
the online community also provide feedback through other social media platforms and those
platforms allow other people who are not integrated with in the community to possibly chime
in. So I could see how the writing taking place is effective in and out of the community.