Research Papers....

Ugh, research papers. All throughout high school there was always the one dreaded assignment during the school year: research papers. They were boring and lackluster. Research papers were my enemy. All the stupid note cards and the MANDATORY five sources were SO annoying. Just thinking about it kind of pisses me off. I think the worst thing about it was that it was always about a topic that I had no interest in. One was about Charles Dickens, another about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. I had to make sure that there were a certain number of “proving points” that I had to make and with each point I needed facts to back it up. My teachers always told me that the paper shouldn’t be a bunch of facts on a page but that it had to be a paper expressing my opinion, however it was always a boring, voiceless research paper. Hit the snooze button on those topics. My teacher always gave us a topic to write about and we could pick a specific sub topic. It wouldn’t be that bad but the topics were horrible and I had no interest in writing about it. The passage that I read was interesting. It made me feel better about writing this upcoming research paper. Hopefully I’ll be allowed to pick my own topic to write about. If that were the case then I might actually do a decent job and it would be pretty cool to write about. I am so relieved that this might not be that painful of a paper! My teachers in high school always said that the papers we wrote were the format of college papers but it’s not at all. I wish I could go back to high school and show my English teachers the passage in “The Curious Researcher” that showed me how to REALLY write a research paper.