In reflecting on my experience with the research paper, I feel like there are some aspects that I liked and felt really helped, as well as other aspects that I would change for myself, but that not necessarily for everyone else. Concerning the process in the beginning, when we first started re-reading our novels that we chose, I feel that I agree with what William said during class—that it would have been nice to have had a longer bit of time to finish the book (perhaps it would have helped if we had decided on the books that we would re-read earlier?) But then again, perhaps it could have been just because I chose to re-read The Poisonwood Bible (which I don’t regret doing! But it was a bit long—only about 560 pages…)? I felt a bit rushed when I was reading it and was a bit too focused on finishing the book so I wasn’t able to take as detailed annotations as I would have liked to. However, I did like how the second part of the process was structured in that it gave us plenty of time to find our critical sources as well as analyze how they contribute to our own understanding of the novel through the annotated bibliographies and summaries we made for each source. Rather than having all the annotated bibliographies for all the critical sources due at once at the same time, I felt that spacing the dues dates out, with sufficient time between each source’s due date gave me more time to focus on finding a suitable source of literary criticism (rather than the book reviews that often came up). In addition, even though spacing out the due dates may have caused us to sometimes forget the content of the critical sources or mix them up, I felt that writing the annotated bibliographies and summaries became an advantage in that aspect because it allowed us to reread what we previously wrote about the source and refresh our memories to pick out the main points from the source that we thought were useful, rather than having to reread the entire source again. In addition, turning in the annotated bibliographies of the critical sources earlier (before the paper) also let us realize any mistakes we had in MLA citations of the sources beforehand so that we could easily correct them in our future sources and on the paper itself. In writing the paper, I think using the outline format for the rough draft was a good idea because it helped us organize our thoughts better, but, perhaps since it was the first time that we created an outline for a research paper like this, at first it was hard to adapt to because we initially we didn’t have an exact format to follow (I think we originally all had our own different ideas of what the outline should have looked like—I remember coming with to class with my outline and thinking, “Um… am I missing something here? Why does everyone’s outline look so different? ”). So perhaps if we had had the exact guidelines for the outline structure in the beginning, it would have let the writing process go more smoothly. I did really enjoy the peer editing though and I think doing more than just one session of peer editing would help a lot too because it’s good to consider other’s perspectives (they can pick out errors and give suggestions that you don’t always see/think of!).
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