Critical Research Paper

When I started writing my essay, I had kept the thought in my mind I would do an outline of my writing before I started to write. The outline helped tremendously because I was able to formulate my way of thinking. At first, I thought that this was going nowhere and that it was going to be difficult, however I was inspired to choose a topic when I saw something on television in which the director was critiquing his actors to be more like society.

Writing this critical research paper was different compared to any pieces of writing I’ve ever written. I didn’t really know how I would write my proposal or even begin to choose the prompt. I probably went over through all of the of the prompts and that alone took me about 2 weeks to do. It was tough because there’s so many choices and that choosing my own adventure would be exciting yet frightening at the same time. I realized that I wanted to do prompt 4 because something out of it I found very interesting and it was worth the exploration.

I able to formulate the entire essay in a span of 2 days. Once I had all the necessary information, I was finally able to put it all together. It took a lot of self-edit and peer edit as well. I felt like the most difficult part about writing this essay was the fact that I wasn’t able to make it to any of the workshop classes after school to due class which ends at 4:45pm. Overall, I was able to learn a lot from this writing and from the course itself throughout the semester.

Exploratory Essay

When I started writing my paper, I couldn’t really decide which out of the four stories was I going to write. I guess with all writers, finding your main topic is very crucial.  I read all four of the short stories provided and out of the four, “The Black Cat”, written by Edgar Allen Poe stood out to me more. I read all four stories at 3:30 am and the word mysterious came into my mind because all the stories had very interesting and disturbing plots which I enjoyed for the most part.

I was actually glad that the deadline for this paper was extended because, for a whole week, all I had was a half introduction with a thesis statement that did not even sound like a statement. I had outlines, of course, however, the outlines only got me so far. I was able to find pieces of evidence to prove the topic that I was going to be writing about. I guess when it comes to writing something, what I’ve learned so far is that I really should take more time to actually go into a deeper thinking and make a deeper connection with the text. At first, writing the introduction with a working thesis statement was difficult, however, it all made sense once Ms. Killebrew helped me in revising my statement to make it work. I didn’t really have much difficulty when it came to writing body paragraphs of the paper. I already had a majority of the evidence and I had them paired with each other in order to have my ideas flow from start to finish.

What also helped me in understanding the Freudian concepts were the discussion questions done on Blackboard in Alyssa’s class. The discussion questions helped in a way where I was able to look back into the story and figure why I thought of this. It basically occupied me into thought-provoking questions which constantly kept asking myself as I read Freud’s lectures. This assignment helped me improved my skills, not only as a writer but also as a reader. I was able to do an exploratory essay in which I had to read an entire short story on own and then figure out how it all relates back to Freud’s concepts of psychoanalysis. Overall, this helped me in engaging in Course Learning Outcomes because it’s definitely helped me with my upcoming critical research paper.

Literacy Narrative

When I started writing my essay, I had kept the thought in my mind that I was strongly going to disagree with the fact that Betsy DeVos was being compared to Ruby Bridges. I made sure that I was very critical with what I was going to say so that the readers could also get my perspective about the topic and perhaps relate to it in some way.

Writing this rhetorical essay was different compared to any pieces of writing I’ve ever written. At first, I didn’t really know how I should formulate my essay, nor did I know how I would phrase the ideas that were constantly popping in my head. I ended up just writing anything and tried to see what made sense out of it. After a while, I ended up making sense of it and I finally figured how I could get my point across. As I compared the two illustrations, I made sure to be straight forward and also to be critical in my response that I was strongly against the comparison between the two figures in the illustration.

I added pretty much all parts of the rhetorical practices that we went over in class. Choosing the appropriate genre was difficult since there were so many that could fit perfectly for the two pieces, however I made it work by choosing two simple genres that most readers would feel and sense as they read. The stance of my essay was greatly influenced by most of the facts that I added in the paragraphs. Once I had all my ideas formulated, all that was left was to find the right words to perfectly fit the narrative.