Krysta Eason
Reflective Essay
Over the past semester I feel that I wasn’t the most creative with my research topic. Looking back I chose something simple and safe due to the fact that video games is what I know. For all my life video games has been very prevalent but everything that I researched and did, I feel that it didn’t fully help me develop my own mind. I believe if I chose a different topic, still to my interests but something that I am not as fluent in. If I chose this path of development , I think it would have made the process for me a lot more enjoyable and interesting.
Now when it came to executing my project, I already knew of the beneficial factors of video games. What I was really looking for instead of answers to my research question is more of support to my own claim. A lot of what I found did just that and I was able to gather a nice amount of support for my claims. Throughout the research process I was really hoping that I would get more statistical examples because I believe that a more logical approach is a stronger one but I feel that a lot of my research was that it could happen but never gave numbers for when it did happen and I feel that made my research weak. Now as mentioned before I feel like I did not learn much from researching this topic because I had so much prior knowledge. However, I learned a few random things that added claims and counterclaims to my paper that I previously did not think of. With completing the work for Unit 2, I did find the review of the resources a bit tedious but I can admit that it aided in easing the process for much of the rest of the assignments for Unit 2.
When it came to working on writing my essay in Unit 3 I found that when I first wrote it, I wrote it without complications. I was able to reach the first recommended word count and put all my thoughts on the page with no problem. I didn’t use all the of the research that I found in unit 2 however, I did use majority of it. Now where the difficulty began was expanding my draft essay to meet the required length for the final. I feel that this was quite difficult because I did not have enough research, which required me to find more. The exercises I did find helpful, especially the one where we had to cut up our essays. I like that one in particular due to the fact that it allowed me to note extra information I wanted to expand on and create new paragraphs that allowed me to also lengthen my paragraph. Once I completed this process I was able to conduct more research based on those notes and provide more examples and allow me to further elaborate on my own claims. I feel that without completing that assignment I would have been having a more difficult time writing my essay. Once I was able to finish my essay I went back in to ensure that everything was completely formated. The final product of my essay I felt wasn’t my best work for many reasons. One was because I felt that since the topic was so generic for me I was not satisfied, I wished that I did something different simply because it would have been more interesting. I also was not a fan of my writing, I am accustomed to writing many papers due to past experience and I know that this research paper wasn’t my best work.
Overall from writing this paper, I have learned quite a few things. One as frequently mentioned, I am not going to “play it safe”, if I were to do this over again, I would have chosen a new topic that is still in my field of interests, however, something that I can learn as I work. I also now understand the amount of research that a paper requires, I don’t have much experience with research papers and what I have done has not been as long as this paper was, so I wasn’t sure of how much research I should have had prepared for my paper. If I had more at the beginning, I would have been able to write a substantial amount without needing to find multiple sources for me to be able to expand my essay. Lastly, I learned apaformating, I have always done MLA due to high school and I know this was a generic skill to have learned, however I was completely new to the formating which caused me to have to constantly read up to ensure that I was executing it correctly.
Now with unit 4, our final project, I already knew what I wanted to do when I heard that it’s sorta like a multimedia project, but a translation. Taking skills that I learned from UNIV 112, I wanted to make a video. I chose the video over everything because with my skill set, I felt that a video was the best way I could express my essay effectively. While creating the draft, the idea that I had in my mind was that I would take clips from video games and note out how they are beneficial to children, but then I realized that accessing all these games would be a long video and the point that I want my video to make is to introduce the idea to parents that video games are not a negative thing to children. If the video is too long I feel like this would be lost in disinterest. I decided then to take a new route and still use the clips of video games however, I would just used them as examples when I listed the video game positives. I also decided that I would bring up the fact that TV is worse than video games and use that as a thinking point for the parents as a way to introduce the topic. Overall, I am proud of what I made, I feel like it did a good job sending over the general point in a way that would not cause disinterest. It was something that did not take me much time due to my experience making videos, which was a plus.
Concluding my reflective statement, if I were to redo it all I would attempt a different topic however, I feel like the end result was acceptable in its own.