Preface Hello, and welcome to my research project web page! Much like my Narrative Project, my experiences with writing research projects are very limited. I have done multiple research projects before, but it was when I was in high school. We would do maybe at best two research projects a year. Each of these research projects would be the same layout and quite honestly did not require much thought. They were your every day research papers, you go find a topic, do some research so you are informed, and then write about it. The research papers I have written were all like this, they were not composed of arguments or included elements of persuasion. Pretty much each time I wrote one it was in the MLA format as well. They were all formatted as "This is the topic I researched, and here is a bunch of information on it". For me, I have always hated writing research papers. They are very time consuming, not fun to write, and just flat out boring. However, this type of research project is very different. I will be using mostly an Op-Ed writing style for this piece. You can find the requirements for this project on our class research paper assignment sheet.
This research project focuses on the term zeitgeist. The term comes from the German words "Zeit" which means time and "Geist" meaning spirit. Our project consists of us going and researching an American Zeitgeist, or in other words something that captures the "spirit of the time" within America today. We are tasked with going and finding one of these American Zeitgeists and arguing the point of why it captures the spirit of America. For me I chose to research cell phones as an American zeitgeist. My paper will mostly be geared towards entry level college students, those from the age of 18-21, due to fact I believe this is where the problem stems from. Overall, I want to take this zeitgeist and show how it is destroying the minds of the young generation, and hopefully open them up to putting down their phones and actually living.
The process of this research project has not been the easiest. I started my process in my Blog post 10: Exploring American Zeitgeist. Here I started to explore what I thought my topic was going to be. I had originally chosen social media as a zeitgeist but it was made clear to me that this was way too broad. In my process of narrowing it down I chose a different topic, but similar still. This came about in Blog post 11: Cell phones. I took a look into it a little more and realized social media wasn't the problem, but in fact it was cell phones in general! So I described why I went about changing my topic in this blog post, and it helped me become much more focused on the task at hand. It allowed me to review my research question, which is "how do cell phones represent a negative American zeitgeist today?" as well as really put into perspective for me how important it actually was. I believe it is a huge problem here in the U.S. and I expressed that in my blog post. The process didn't stop there though, Blog post 12: Cell Phones #2, helped me gather my thoughts together. For this post I took all of the links and potential sources and laid them out. Once I had done that, I put them together in the blog and wrote down one or two things that would be helpful from each of the articles. This ended up helping a lot because it kept all of my sources and arguments in one area that was easily accessible.
The next step was looking at my research project and reviewing it. I learned about doing this when I was in high school. My teachers always told me that once you have the paper written, go back through and annotate it like they would. So that is what I did. I sat down at home and looked it over and "red penned" the hell out of it. Then in class we did something similar, Blog post 13: An X-ray of my Argument. In this post we took our specific argument and broke down the components of it to see where we were slacking. Like I said, I red penned the hell out of my paper, but this was something different and new. I never thought about taking a look at just the specific argument and its components. I've always red penned my papers for grammar and spelling and overall layout and flow. This blog post went more in depth to actually analyze what I was writing. I honestly do not know why I hadn't thought to do this with my research project yet. It is a relatively new concept to me, but we have done it in class multiple times in Blog Post 8: the well being of my digital portfolio, Blog post 5: A wizard of oz journey, and then other assignments that we had done in class with analyzing. This helped me to complete the following drafts and to instead of just reviewing my project, to revise and analyze.
I hope you enjoy my research project, and please, if you have any feedback let me know so I can make it better than before!