Final Blog

Aaron Straker

12/12/12

Eng 103

                        My advice for anyone going to take this class, is to pick a topic that you’re interested in or if it’s a movie that you’ve seen and really enjoyed.  If it’s a movie you didn’t see just make sure it’s a topic/genre that you’ll greatly enjoy.  Don’t pick a romance movie if you have a strong interest in thrillers.  Something I wished to have known at the beginning of the course was how much research you have to do, also what was told which I didn’t do was print out your sources beforehand.  It would have been much easier to print out your sources for your folder than scrambling at the end.  Citing the sources and finding good ones was actually easier than I thought.  Since all the tools were provided and with a mla citation converter made things easier.  For LexisNexis and Gale Virtual Reference Library find the most recent sources because if they aren’t recent, you don’t know if the information or claims have changed or proved to actually be wrong.  I would have printed out my sources for the beginning so I wouldn’t have had to scramble at the end for my final paper.  I learned that the research paper is very difficult, and takes a lot of time.  First you need to pick a topic, then write the essay and find good sources and paraphrase them.  If you have a good paper without paraphrases all your good work can go down the drain due to plagiarism.  The research paper has many steps and many things that need to be checked over on multiple occasions.  This isn’t the kind of paper you can start and finish over night.