“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.”
- Seneca
- Seneca
Welcome to my research project page!
Assignment sheet
My previous experience with research writing is not amazing I would like to believe. Mostly, the research papers that I have completed in the past were literary analysis on old books that were not interesting to me. We can all agree that when you don’t want to write about, let alone read, a 200 year old book, your writing suffers. Like a lot of older literature, I just never understood what makes a good research paper.
When it came to writing research papers for science, I was better, but I always strayed away from the rigid format that scientists use. While it probably is not the greatest idea to experiment with your writing on a science project, I found that even when I tried new things on an English paper I ate dirt. I also don't think that I have ever written a research paper on something that I chose.
For the research half of the paper I usually approach it and outline it in the same way. I found that having a base to push off of has helped me find what I need more efficiently, and using an outline that allows me to think more sequentially keeps me on track and on pace. I think that mostly comes from the way I, and my parents, interpret information in patterns. The arsenal of mental formulas I use for research have served me well, but that kind of rhythm also makes it hard to venture outside my comfort zone when approaching any kind of paper.
This whole project pretty much started with Miss Representation, which is what my blog post Research Project: Chasm discusses. I think Miss Representation was a great place to push off of because it was very textbook in the way it presented its information. It also had a strong argument for what kind of power the media has over equality.
The Mask You Live In also has the same kind of textbook presentation of the information to burn it into your memory. My blog post Research Project: Belly of the Beast goes over my thoughts on it a little more. I had a more personal understanding of the second film which kind of introduced a bias of its own when choosing a research question.
My question is "What can Americans do to redefine masculinity for our sons?"
. . . but it was not always my question. The blog post Research Project: Awakening goes through my seemingly drunken thought process of trying to come up with my own question and justify it, but failing miserably by completely avoiding the prompt. The next step in my process was to choose how my argument was presented. My blog post Research Project: Archive has pretty much all of my notes for this project, and in my notes, I started to write an MLA paper, but I didn't like it at all. After discussing it with Sabatino, I settled on short stories to get my ideas across.
My 14th blog post, Research Project: Reflection, was a reflection of my notes and the process itself. This reflection was really needed because I was not psyched about how my project turned out. The first draft makes absolutely no sense because there is very limited context in it. There needed to be more explanations of why I chose to write the stories the way I did, and there needed to be some context to what they mean.
Assignment sheet
My previous experience with research writing is not amazing I would like to believe. Mostly, the research papers that I have completed in the past were literary analysis on old books that were not interesting to me. We can all agree that when you don’t want to write about, let alone read, a 200 year old book, your writing suffers. Like a lot of older literature, I just never understood what makes a good research paper.
When it came to writing research papers for science, I was better, but I always strayed away from the rigid format that scientists use. While it probably is not the greatest idea to experiment with your writing on a science project, I found that even when I tried new things on an English paper I ate dirt. I also don't think that I have ever written a research paper on something that I chose.
For the research half of the paper I usually approach it and outline it in the same way. I found that having a base to push off of has helped me find what I need more efficiently, and using an outline that allows me to think more sequentially keeps me on track and on pace. I think that mostly comes from the way I, and my parents, interpret information in patterns. The arsenal of mental formulas I use for research have served me well, but that kind of rhythm also makes it hard to venture outside my comfort zone when approaching any kind of paper.
This whole project pretty much started with Miss Representation, which is what my blog post Research Project: Chasm discusses. I think Miss Representation was a great place to push off of because it was very textbook in the way it presented its information. It also had a strong argument for what kind of power the media has over equality.
The Mask You Live In also has the same kind of textbook presentation of the information to burn it into your memory. My blog post Research Project: Belly of the Beast goes over my thoughts on it a little more. I had a more personal understanding of the second film which kind of introduced a bias of its own when choosing a research question.
My question is "What can Americans do to redefine masculinity for our sons?"
. . . but it was not always my question. The blog post Research Project: Awakening goes through my seemingly drunken thought process of trying to come up with my own question and justify it, but failing miserably by completely avoiding the prompt. The next step in my process was to choose how my argument was presented. My blog post Research Project: Archive has pretty much all of my notes for this project, and in my notes, I started to write an MLA paper, but I didn't like it at all. After discussing it with Sabatino, I settled on short stories to get my ideas across.
My 14th blog post, Research Project: Reflection, was a reflection of my notes and the process itself. This reflection was really needed because I was not psyched about how my project turned out. The first draft makes absolutely no sense because there is very limited context in it. There needed to be more explanations of why I chose to write the stories the way I did, and there needed to be some context to what they mean.