Kevin Stefanye Journal #3

            My first source was extremely informative. It talked about the definition of procrastination, the history, why people do it, how many people do it, and many more things. I think that finding out why people procrastinate is actually an interesting process because I can see a lot of myself in this study. It talks about what goes through people’s mind when they give themselves excuses to do the work later, and to be honest, a lot of what they are saying goes through my mind as well. This source actually brought up a lot of aspects of procrastination that I would not have thought of, such as organization, mood, and gender. These new topics will strengthen my argument by giving me extra talking points and factual information to support my argument. As this is a scholarly source, the author speaks from experience, as the author has extensively researched procrastination, the motives for procrastination, the effects of procrastination, and the people who procrastinate. The author is speaking for himself, I suppose. The author has done an incredible amount of research, and clearly knows every detail about what he has studied, but the author cannot speak for everybody, because perhaps others have contradicting research, and his sample size is not large enough to speak for an entire population. His audience would be anybody who is looking for an extensive account on procrastination. The audience would also have to have some previous knowledge about procrastination, and would likely need at least a high school education to be able to finish the article and comprehend its contents. The author may have a bias in that he does not procrastinate, therefore it is difficult for him to really get inside a procrastinator’s head and tell what they are thinking. I am seeing a trend in age, as young people with less responsibility tend to procrastinate more than older people with a larger consequence in waiting should they fail to complete their work. I think I may be able to delve deeper in that last idea, because I’m thinking that procrastination may be correlated with maturity, especially brain development.

            My second article focused more on student procrastination than the previous one, which did talk about students, but also went on to broader topics that included more than just students. I thought the last one pertained to me, but this one was even more so relevant to my life. I can see how a lot of the key ideas in this article were familiar to my own thought process. This source talked more about the brain process, and the motivation behind procrastination, and also provided some case studies. It made me think about what really goes on in our brain to tell us to do that, and how much of procrastination is from the way we are raised versus the electrical impulses in our brain telling us to do things later. This new information strengthens my topic by giving me a new insight as to why people procrastinate, by talking about the workings of the cognitive brain and how the tiniest things that go on inside of our brains have a massive effect on what we do. The author speaks from the point of view of a psychology professor at the University of Houston, so he is truly an expert on the topic. I think this source has the same exact audience as my previous source. It is a scholarly journal, so this would be directed at somebody who wanted an in depth article about procrastination. The only difference is that this source was more focused on student procrastination rather than general procrastination, so perhaps this source would be more helpful to young students than it would be to adults who procrastinate in the working world.  The audience would have to have at least a high school education to understand some of the terminology of this article,  as well as to get through the whole thing, as it is lengthy. There does not seem to be much bias, but one possible bias would be that since he works with the inner workings of the brain every day, he may think that it plays a larger role in procrastination than it really does. This source has a lot of the same points as the last source, and I am starting to see a lot of common factors that many professionals can agree on. I think I can focus my argument even more on the brain, and how the occurrences inside the certain lobes have a crucial effect on what really goes on inside the conscious brain.