Cover Letter
April 29th, 2008888 Grant St.
Indiana, PA 15701-1094
April 28, 2008
Dr. Kenneth Sherwood
English Department
Leonard Hall, Room 110
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Indiana, PA 15705-1094
Dear Dr. Sherwood
This paper, although only ten pages became the biggest project that I had for the semester. My fickleness forced me to spend grueling minutes on the smallest of tasks to allow this paper to take form. My progress improved as the deadline drew near, as I actually started getting my thoughts into order. Looking back on my mini-essay, my idea for the research paper was the One Laptop per Child organization. I had a hard time organizing my thoughts to come up with a question concerning this topic and elaborating on it. So, I then considered the topic of solar energy use. As I began to search more about this subject, I began to realize that I did not have a well-formulated question to support a ten page paper. After frustrating myself by not making a firm decision on a topic, I considered a problem that was somewhat familiar to me. My thoughts started drifting to the problem of child obesity and their excessive media viewing habits. This change of mind is the reason that I have two bibliographies, source groupings, and other parts of my blog. After setting up this final basic idea, I began to collect information from various sources. Ebsco-Host helped me out a lot, giving me many sources of valuable information, as did our library, where I actually learned how to find a book by looking at the code. When starting off the paper, I wrote many of my own ideas without any of the support I had collected to back my words up. After you revised it, I learned that I needed to verify my work with solid facts about this topic of weight gain and media networking. Applying more of the sources that I researched throughout my paper allowed the information to be more substantial and to flow more easily.
When actually writing the first draft, I found that the outline you had us write in class and post on our blog was very helpful in allowing me to focus on what I needed to explain in an orderly fashion. It became a nice tool for adjusting the paragraphs into place. I liked how the working bibliography was established onto the blog at a very early stage, so that I could go back and adjust it exactly as needed, instead of making a hurried version when the body of the paper was finished. The concept of putting every step into a blog was somewhat challenging to me. I had never really participated in blogging before, so this was a new experience. Though putting each step onto Lyceum was much more work than just typing out the actual paper, I am glad that I had to do it because it was a new experience, and in some ways it really did help me to reference my work and to compare with my classmate’s work. This paper gave me a better understanding of what a research paper is really about and how to complete one efficiently. Although I had written one in high school, the concept of asking and answering a question was not fully present then. During the course of this paper, I feel that there was a finished question with a good attempt at answering it. I have learned from this experience that the more I write, the better I will become at it, just like anything else.
Sincerely,
Adrienne Goss