Month: April 2017

Due to my experiences in high school I believe that I have a strong ability to write quickly and fully. I took several writing classes with a teacher who had her doctorate. Due to this her course level was very high and our assignments were college course based. We did a lot of timed essays that required research, allowing me to learn how to quickly come up with an essay.

Having gone to a small school, I had mostly small classes. Perhaps due to this we never had any word limits on our essays. I found this to be a real struggle yesterday and had to cut a lot of my thoughts out to keep my word count down. I do ramble on, and I need to work on that. I have always been encouraged to expand, and I am not very competent at keeping my work concise.

For this research paper I picked a topic that was very recent which made it hard to find academic articles about it. In general there were very few academic articles about female politicians, and even fewer about their treatment. Instead of having several books, websites, journals, articles, as I normally would, all I had were opinion pieces. I did my best to use what resources I had, but I’m afraid they weren’t all scholarly and that might reflect badly upon my paper. I also had an original goal to compare a female and male politician, but with all the current news, it was hard to find any material relating to the election. The most difficult part for me was to find a balanced way of bringing up this topic. I didn’t want my own political views to enter (I didn’t want to pick a winner), as I don’t want my personal preference to sway how people view my paper. I want people to see that Hillary Clinton did have to deal with things that male politicians don’t and I didn’t want people to think I just wanted her to win so I will throw anything out there. In the end I didn’t end up having anything in my paper about Donald Trump as I couldn’t find a good comparison of the treatment. Since the election there has been such a large amount of news articles it was very hard to sort through them, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. I really hope my paper still communicates what I hoped it would. I am very proud of my thesis statement for this paper. I also feel both my opening line and my conclusion have a very powerful feel. Though I am also confident in my entire paper, I feel like a rarely have good, strong openers/closers. My one grammatical fear for this paper is my dependent clauses. As I had an editor reading she noted that I had one paragraph that was almost entirely made up of sentences that start with dependent clauses. I tried to reword them, but it wasn’t having as powerful of a statement. I got rid of some of them and reworked some others, but now I am worried that there are still too many throughout my paper.