We all knew it was coming. Everything we have done was leading us to this point like a lamb to slaughter. It started easy, we were all thinking this was going to be a breeze, then bam! A comprehensive argumentative research paper, diverse sourcing, photo copies of our material and discussing my least favorite book of the entire class. Amazing. Thus is college and the things we do for a grade. I'll be honest; I've erased the notions that I'll be getting an A on this paper. I am shooting for a B and settling for a solid C. I guess that's why you do well in the beginning, on the easy stuff.
To be honest, I'm not too thrilled about our topics. They seem dull if you ask me. RLiT was a boring book in my opinion and it was very hard for me to connect to it, then asking me to compare it to another piece of classic literature is pouring salt in my gaping wounds! But, I'll survive. I have 1 page down, a few sources out of the way and I think I'm moving at a decent pace, although other classes' finals and papers will start to bog my progress quite a bit.
I understand the purpose of the assignment. It's to get us ready for a more in-depth look at classic literature and how to analyze it. Not my favorite topic, but like I said, getting A's and B's is a good thing. I guess I wish we had a choice of which book we wanted to do our paper on. Personally, I totally had a connection with Animal Farm. On the contrary, RLiT was like torture, I just couldn't get into it for the life of me! Nothing against the book, I'm sure some people absolutely loved it; maybe it changed their lives for all I know.
The largest obstacle for me was getting my thesis down. Now, this is usually my problem. Once I start the rest seems to flow. As of today, I do have a thesis and an accompanying page. The sourcing is going slowly I have to say and it isn't from lack of looking. Maybe it's because I have never had to write a paper such as this or I'm just really not that into it, but I'm having a heck of a time! Luckily we still have plenty of time to scratch some semblance of a college level work out!
I guess we’ll just have to see how it progresses from here. Like I said before, I’ve done pretty darn well since the beginning; missing less than 70 points all together (I was lazy and missed an entire group assignment). So getting a C on this paper is something that I have come to peace with. It isn’t because I’m lazy or because I don’t have the drive to push on when the assignments get tough. Honestly, the topic is horribly boring to me and I would rather watch 1,000 episodes of The Glen Beck Show (I’m very liberal, see the irony?) than argue for these two works.
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My exact words “the dreaded research paper”. It’s like you took the word right out of my mouth. It is very funny how most of the blogs I have read say that their least favorite book of the year was Reading Lolita in Tehran. I too was not very thrilled with the writing prompts. I had a hard time following the Reading Lolita in Tehran book and I would find myself reading the same sentence over and over or having to re-read the same paragraph because I was not paying attention to what I was reading. Animal Farm was a much better and I was more interested in it. What has to be done will be done, all for the sake of a good grade. Well, good luck on your research paper and your finals coming very soon.
ReplyDeleteI agree Eric, out of all of the assignments, this one seems dull. I think that for our writing to shine we should be passionate about the material we are writing about; for example: Animal Farm, or the essay on Global Warming. I did my Rhetorical Analysis on Gore’s speech and I feel could have easily Ace’d or Bee’d that if it had only been an Argumentative research essay instead of the Analytical paper that it was. But it would be too easy if we were writing about something we found easy to write about (and maybe this is the idea). I tend to see this as a workout. The fact that it is not as exciting as the other papers we had to write will certainly be engraved in some part of our conscious mind, and hopefully will be useful to us in the future.
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree that the hardest part is coming up with a thesis, but in this case I think it will be even harder finding sources to support my thesis. I didn’t feel very excited about the prompt for Lolita; I would have liked to explore the prompt for Invitation to a Beheading, but since I had already started to read Lolita, I wasn’t about to start reading another book. I think it would have been helpful to have been told early in the semester that we were going to be required to read one of these other texts. I like to believe that Jennifer has a reason for this, but this is what we have to work with, so now we just have to make the best of it.
It sounds like your passionate dislike for the material could be what fuels your essay – Just a thought. Good Luck.