Tuesday, April 7, 2015

The Writing and Research Process for Paper #3


When deciding which essay to expand on for the research paper, I had trouble with picking which one that would be best to research about online. Once I re read each essay and came up with some ideas for the research paper, I found that the comparison of two poems essay really interested me more and made me want to go beyond just the similarities and differences between the two poems. My goal is to really pull out the heart of each poem and expand in a way that has more depth about the actual importance in the meanings of the two works.

 The two poems that I closely looked at in my second essay were “Slowly” by Donna Masini and “The Cove” by Dick Allen. The first poem talks about the slow process in realizing the death of a loved one whereas the other focuses on the fear of dying. So ultimately, my theme in that essay was about death.

However, for the research paper, rather than just talk about death, I really want to take it to the next level and search for deeper meanings or feelings about dying and the different kinds of impacts it has on people around the world. Death is such a serious matter and often ignored or not talked about and I want to strive to show how people react and the real effects it has on real people.

After figuring out my main focus for the paper, I made a list of search terms in order to help successfully find what I am looking for at the Academic Search Complete online database. Some of these terms included: fear of death, stages of grief, loved one, psych*, feelings of death, and emotion* from dying. When trying out different terms and looking for articles that fit well with my purpose for the paper, I found that it was very difficult in doing this.

 After typing multiple different words to search, I tried to narrow down my searches by changing the publication date, the subject, and making sure it was in full text mode. There were several articles that came up which were not what I was searching for, but after playing with the site and continuing changing around the search terms, I did find a few that seemed to be pretty on point for my expanding topic about death.

A couple articles that caught my eye were “The normal process of grieving” and “A special way of being afraid”. These two became noticeable once I typed in stages of grieving in the search bar. I think that both of these articles will help further explain in my research paper about the true feelings of people every day after a loved one has passed away and also, the natural yet terrifying fear of dying.

With these two articles and hopefully a few more, I plan to use them to back up my observations about death from the poems and elaborate more on an emotional or psychological element.

Throughout this process of researching and finding good information to add in my paper, it has been a little hard and a bit intimidating because there is so much research online about death, but I am looking for the exact articles which really go beyond just death. However, I am ready for the challenge in finding the rest of secondary sources and to start writing my research paper. I hope to grab people’s attention and make them feel the emotions behind the harsh subject of death.

1 comment:

  1. It sounds as if you have come up with some original research materials for your essay.

    ReplyDelete