Thursday, February 18, 2010
Reflection on 1st Paper
For me, writing the small object/large subject essay was difficult for me. This paper was quite different from the papers I'm used to writing. I'm used to writing book/play analysis papers and creative writing but I've never really had to do a research paper on an actual object...at least not recently. I tried something new in my introduction this time. I usually do a sort of funnel introduction where I start with a very broad topic and change to a very specific topic for my thesis. But this time I tried opening my essay with the "tell a story" technique. I wasn't particularly happy with how it turned out but I'm glad I tried something new for this paper. I didn't find my topic that interesting although I found out some information that I definitely didn't know before that piqued my curiosity and helped drive me to finish the paper. I also didn't have as much time as I would have liked set aside for writing this paper, it seemed like all my professors conspired to overwork me that week, I had three other essays besides this one that have been due at around the same time, so I managed the best I could with what time I had. Overall I was happy with how the paper turned out but I haven't actually seen the grade I received on it yet so that opinion might change...
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Hi Erin, It's interesting to me that you wrote about a topic that didn't interest you very much. The assignment gave you a lot of leeway to locate an intriguing or disturbing topic. Did you feel constrained to the topics on list?
ReplyDeletewell, it's more like I originally picked the sugar substitutes topic because I thought it would be interesting. I have always heard that certain kinds of artificial sweeteners can make people really sick and cause cancer and such...but after researching the topic I found out that most of it was not true. I've always been a supporter of organic foods so I was kind of hoping to totally shoot down the idea of artificial sweeteners. So no, I didn't feel constrained at all, I guess I just wanted my topic to be "juicier" than it was.
ReplyDeleteReally? My friend did a research paper in high school on aspartame and found this study of doctors who wrote down ailments of people who had it frequently, occasionally, and not at all. The people who used it frequently suffered from Alzheimers and cancer in extreme cases. Others has weird side-effects. Her speech scarred me for life. I flinch when I watch someone drinking that stuff.I definitely would flip out if even a teaspoon of it entered my system. It's interesting to hear that there are competing theories about this. I thought, like you did, that it was completely negative towards artificial sweeteners.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I thought too but I just couldn't find anything conclusive for artificial sweeteners causing people to become really sick. Perhaps I didn't use the right search words or something but nothing really came up, which surprised me quite a bit. Although I did find an article describing how fake sugar actually didn't really help with dieting at all, that the body would realize that the substance was not really a variation of glucose and react by craving more of it than it would if it was just normal sugar. Apparently we have built in instincts that help us judge the amount of sugar needed and those instincts get thrown off if we try to substitute something else for sugar.
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