research papers

I took American literature/ research paper my junior year of high school. Everyone knew that was one of the hardest classes in the school because writing the research papers was so time consuming and the teachers graded them really hard. I had a research paper for each semester of that class. The first semester, my research paper was on violence in gangs and how the number of violent gang-related crimes was actually decreasing. The second semester, the topic for our research paper was on a famous american author and some aspect about their works. I wrote about F. Scott Fiztgerald and his symbolism in some of his works particularly the great gatsby. I hated writing these research papers. There were so many deadlines to keep up with. we started off giving the teacher a topic proposal, and if she approved it we began looking for academic sources and doing notecards. A few weeks into the paper and about eighty notecards later, we had to turn in a first draft of an outline, followed by two more drafts of the outline. After we had a good final draft of the outline, we wrote two rough drafts before turning in the finished product. I hated that we had something we had to turn in every single week because it was easy to forget. Overall, I didn't like the class very much because my teacher didn't like me and there were a ton of deadlines, but it taught me how to write a good research paper.