Report #1 Reflection

To be honest, I didn’t have any predictions as to how well or how bad my first paper would come out. Of course, I wanted to conduct a research and produce an out-of-this- world paper, but that just wishful thinking. I knew that my first paper wouldn’t be and didn’t have to be perfect, so I kept this in mind. At the same time, I set my standards somewhat high so that I wouldn’t slack at any moment just because this was our first, non-guided paper. In the end, I surprisingly found a few positive aspects of my paper that even I liked and, of course, I made mistakes that hopefully won’t be made again.

To begin, I’ll share my thoughts on what I did well on (or personally thought I did well on). One of the most important parts of writing a research paper is to be interested in the topic you are researching. I chose a topic that I had been writing about in my blog. It was a topic I thoroughly enjoyed because I was able to write my paper based on experience and observation. As I just mentioned, my research was based on experience and observation, but also, I asked for the advice of others. I conducted a survey that I thought went pretty well. In my opinion, the questions were interesting and somewhat personal so I was excited to read the results when they came back. All in all, I thought the best thing I did on the paper was choosing the topic and conducting research that was actually relevant to my research question.

My first paper came out alright, but I discovered a few things that I could have done that would have made my paper a lot better. I thought I did a good job researching, but a horrible job putting it all together. My paper just didn’t flow as I had hoped it would. At first, I wrote my paper using only my opinions and the survey results. After the conference, I got the idea to do some outside research and perhaps look up scholarly information. The internet provided me significant information, but instead of weaving it into the paper, I simply attached it to the end. This was a bad idea because things became too jumbled together. The paper was slightly confusing at times and hard to figure out just what my research question was. Soon after attaching more info, my topic became too broad. This is when I should have narrowed my topic down, instead of having different facts flying around the paper. I am now very well aware as to what not to do when I obtain more info for my paper.