Journal 4

Throughout high school I had to do only a few research papers. I remember the very first big paper I ever had to do was in 9th grade and it was about Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s role in the woman’s suffrage movement. I actually kind of enjoyed this project because we had a whole semester to do it, and our teacher explained it step by step. We learned how to use various school library resources such as Gale Online and how search for and find scholarly articles. We also learned how to use note cards for summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. Since this was my first research paper I am glad my teacher was so informative otherwise I would have had no idea where to even begin. We spent so many class periods peer editing, making note cards, researching, and learning how to avoid plagiarism. Probably one of the only problems I encountered with this paper was the length. Throughout the whole process I had gathered so much information that it was actually too long and I had trouble figuring out what to take out. I really liked the topic, I thought it was so interesting and I learned so much from it. However, most of my other research paper topics were completely boring and unexciting and I had trouble reaching even the very minimum length. I think that the topic has a very large impact on both the length and quality of the paper.