Discussion
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Comments
Katelin,
I think you have a great topic here. Burnout is a very important subject. I have a HS age son who plays football, and I feel he is over-doing it with the training sometimes.
Anyway, it seems like you have pretty good format here. You have a nice mix of articles, and you break them down pretty well. I did feel at times that the information was a little cumbersome, and I found myself lost a time or two. (that may just be me, so look for additional input) A specific example would be the second paragraph. It was very difficult for me to get through. There were lists of charateristics and definitions that seemed to be jumbled together, and I found it hard to follow. Fortunately, it did seem like simply editing and repositioning some sentences and punctuation could really make it flow better. I think all the information was good, just needs a simple re-organization. .
I do think you need a little work on grammer and some editing. Overall not bad, but like all of us, you could tighten things up some.
It seems like you found some great sources and some significant studies. I look forward to a final version and I',m sure I'll learn a few things in the end.
This draft is better than the last. It includes some good information but is a bit off track. One reason is that your topic is still too broad. There are just too many papers on overtraining. Given that some of the papers you reviewed near the end were not research studies--and should be eliminated--it would be best at this point to take the research studies you do review and figure out a specific common theme from them so that you can focus the paper on that theme and hopefully gather more research studies to review.
The paper can be improved by cutting down on some of the introductory information describing burnout, and get into the reviewing of research sooner. It is reading too much like a report on burnout right now rather than a review of literature. Also, you have some good depth your your summary of the research, but the intent is to critically review the research. So, you could cut down some on the summaries. More importantly, you should introduce much more dialog that is critical of the research. You paper can be further improved by having more of a blending of all of the articles in your discussion, rather than focusing on each separately. Try to draw conclusions and compare and contrast what you have found by reading the research.
You should have a citations supporting that definition you start with in the first paragraph. I might be wrong, but is seems that you are using some second hand citations in the introductory discussion. Second hand means that you are citing references that are referenced in another source. You should only cite information from the original document in which the author’s words and thoughts are presented. Using a second hand reference is considered sloppy and unacceptable research. Based on my suggestion to cut down the dialog about burnout in the beginning, maybe this would be good content to delete.
In academic writing you just want to refer to a study by the authors' last name(s) only (and date). No need for a listing of the title. Referring to the studies by the title added to some confusion when I was reading the review part.
Format: Include an abstract at the beginning. Improve the appearance some, possibly by adding a line space between paragraphs and including subheadings. There are quite a few mistakes in the APA style still. These are mostly minor, but there are a lot.
I enjoyed reading your paper, you seem to have some of the same problems with your paper as I do! I finally did research to find the original document on my research articles to get the refrences that were the actual research report findings, you might try this method. As for the APA format, you might just look at others papers that have it done correctly as he likes it and see what you are doing wrong. Keep up the good effort!