In my Introduction to Communication Research class, we were assigned to write article abstracts as well as a literature review. Part of our research for the class was to learn and understand the different resources available to us. The article abstracts that I wrote for this class helped me to evaluate messages critically because they allowed me to observe lengthy journal articles and write 400-500 word abstracts which summarized the primary information. This helped me to evaluate messages critically by filtering out what was important and necessary for readers.

 

 

In my Introduction to Communication Research class, I wrote a literature review which helped me to analyze and evaluate research already performed about the topic of online dating behaviors. My literature review as a whole helped to demonstrate my ability to evaluate messages because I was able to critically analyze work that had been done on a specific topic and then pose a question/hypothesis. I was able to recognize potential weaknesses in previous work, and aim to eliminate that in my own research.