Getting Started & Introductions

Monday October 15, 2012

     Today we talked about getting started to begin writing our Senior Seminar essays.  I am slightly freaked out about this because I am still doing research and still finding things that I find interesting and want to include in my paper.  I know that at some point I will just need to start writing, but at the current moment I do not feel like I have a sufficient amount of material.  I plan to spend ALL day on Friday at the Aurora Public Library going through their microfilms more and other information that they have.  So, to start off today's discussion we began talking about things that we must keep in mind while writing:  the audience and our writing style.  The intended audience is our professor and our fellow classmates, while the unintended audience will be whoever decides to read it later.  We then talked about our writing style.  This means that we should write our paper like how we talk.  This paper is not for super scholarly people, but more for the common people who do not know much about our topics, therefore, we need to use simple language and explain our arguments clearly.  We must also remember to construct our argument, tie everything back to the argument, and demonstrate perspective.
     We then moved on to talking about introductions.  I, personally, always write my introduction first, but then usually go back after the entire paper is written and tweak some things.  The first thing we did was look at some examples of other people's introductions from books and papers.  We read them, then evaluated what kind of introduction it was.  Some people told stories or gave a brief background of the topic, then the second paragraph has the thesis.  One intro was horrible because it opened up the topic, but then just started listing things and I got bored before I was even done with the paragraph.  For my paper, I am planning on starting out with a brief history of the City of Aurora, then a brief description of the Great Depression (in general), then go into what my paper will be about.  I am still trying to think of an interesting way to get the audience's attention right at the beginning.  Also, the first page or two of our paper should have a long footnote that tells the reader the type of sources used, shows that the author is knowledgeable, and also shows that the reader can look other places for similar information on the topic.
     This conversation moved on to talking about our overall writing.  Obviously, every sentence needs to have a subject and a verb, no run on sentences, have proper transitions, and every point must relate back to the main argument.  We were also told that a thesaurus will be our best friend for writing this paper.  I LOVE the online thesaurus because it has a ton of different examples and other places to look.  Ha, I didn't even know what a thesaurus was until I entered college (thanks high school for preparing me for the real world *sarcasm*).  We were also told to watch our choice of words, not to use slang/jargon, and that everything needs to be in the past-tense.
     There are four types of writing.  Narration is storytelling.  This includes describing an event in a way that attracts the readers, using multiple perspectives, but not too much detail.  Description is writing in a way that brings the people back to the event and making them feel that they are actually there.  One must be careful when writing this because it is easy to make things up that might not have been true back during the event.  The third type of writing is interpretation.  This is where the focus on primary sources comes in.  Under this type of writing, the author must give their interpretation of a source, but not to make it seem like that is the only way to look at a source.  The last type of writing is persuasion.  This is what our argument will be, everything has to help the argument.  Our papers will use all four of these writing styles, some more than others.
     The more we talk about writing our papers, the more excited I get.  I don't feel like I have enouggh information to start writing because I only have the brief history of the Great Depression as a whole, some info on the City of Aurora, and just random information on the different clubs, organizations, etc. that were around in Aurora in the 1930s.  I am planning on looking further at education this week.  I have two other classes, each with papers constantly due, so I really need to start micro-managing my time in order to get all of this done in time!  I am still kicking myself in the butt for not doing any research over the summer!  I could have had the majority of this paper researched and written!!! Ugh....well, next time I will know to just jump-start any and all projects that I know I will have to do for the semester, including reading, researching, and writing!