Blog 10 - Preface

Normally, I don’t write except for pleasure. Most of my writing consists of creative works of fiction or fantasy, or of scripts for Youtube videos or stage productions I’d like to produce. Since starting college two years ago however, writing essays has become a major part of my life. I’d like to think that I am a good researcher, as I have a naturally curious mind. However for some reason, when I am given constrictions to my writing, I clam up. Normally I enjoy researching, but not when I am told to I have to have a certain number of sources and write a paper of a certain number of pages… being told what to do drives me crazy. The essays for this course were no different.

I did have some tricks to getting into a “writing mood”. I’d take an hour or so to completely relax and do something that I wanted to do. Afterwards, I strike up a conversation with a friend or loved one, usually my best friend Courtney or my father, about the topic I’ve chosen to write about to get my though processes flowing and to start focusing my attention on the subject. For example, for the final research paper I was absolutely not in the mood to write about the effects of violence in the media on children. I took a few hours to myself and went to see the new Harry Potter film, and when I got home I discussed the violence and images in the film with my friend Courtney. After our conversation, I was more than ready to write.

Until this course I had not done a rhetorical analysis. The only time I had ever heard of rhetoric was in the writings of Plato and Socrates. Looking back on this paper, it really paved the way for the other three papers. You can’t really analyze your own arguments without being able to objectively look at and break apart someone else’s. My first paper was on the size of models and whether or not they are too skinny for the runway. In choosing this topic out of all of the various political ones, I started to realize that I was more interested in topics which relate more closely to me than might be relevant to a more broad audience. This makes papers easier for me to write, but might not make them as socially relevant since they tend to exclude large audiences.

I write for a blog website by college women for college women sometimes, so I was a little bit familiar with the format of the second paper. A lot of what I write for the blog site is a response to an argument someone else has posed. This is the paper that I found the easiest, and fortunately for me the topic was one of more broad social consequence than my first paper. Being a Jewish woman, it was interesting for me to write in support of Muslim women being allowed to wear what they want in religious practice. I kept having to put aside my religious views and think about the social aspects of what the president of France was doing to these women. I’ve always been a very empathetic person, so after a while it was pretty easy for me to put myself in a French Muslim woman’s shoes and think about how I would feel in her situation.

The topic I chose for the position paper is probably the one I am the most passionate about, but like the first topic it excludes a large audience. I did as much research as I felt I could on this paper in order to include as many people as possible in the audience, but in all reality it isn’t a relative topic to anyone without friends or loved ones who have been diagnosed with ADHD. However because it is such a hot topic in my field of study as a health student, I decided to run with it and I am very glad that I did. The research was pretty hard to get through since a lot of the papers were very scientific and hard to come by, but it was worth it to learn more and write a convincing paper about a topic I am very passionate about.

The final paper has been the hardest to write for me, as a lot has happened for me since the third paper. I was in a car accident and got strep throat a week later, which is a lot worse for me than for most people as I have several congenital heart defects. Because of this I got very behind on the final paper and it is not as high quality as I would have liked. The amount of research I’ve done for this paper is pretty extensive because I’ve had plenty of time in bed to browse various databases, but due to the medication that I’m on I feel like I’m less able to put together a well thought out paper. I really wish I’d been able to get a draft done on time in order to have Professor Bolaski review it before it is due on the 27th.

Overall, I feel like my researching developed a lot over the course, but my writing has varied quite a bit. Because this is such a short course one little event can be enough to throw a lot of things off. Unfortunately for me I’ve had two pretty big events, but only for this last paper. I’ve really enjoyed the freedom of being able to write what I want for these papers. I feel like this freedom has really improved the quality of my research and my writing.