Final Critical Reflective Essay!

In writing my research paper on evil children I had many challenges my first being developing my research question. Developing my research was a bit of a challenge, I knew I wanted to write about children, but that was about as much as I could think of. After doing different activities in class about ghosts and horror films I thought it might be interesting to do research on that as well. So I decided to do a little research on my own about children in horror films and found it very interesting. Finding this so interesting led me to make my research question, why children in horror films tend to scare our culture so much? This was the first research question I thought of doing and luckily my research question has stayed the same. In order to answer my research question I watched and analyzed the movies, The Ring and The Exorcist. Both of these movies helped me tremendously in understanding our cultures views on children and what makes them so frightening to us. I also found many different scholarly sources for my essay, most of them from, Academic Search Complete. I used my articles to support my own thoughts about what I saw happening in these horror films and I also used them to support other ideas I had about our culture view on children. When it comes to my rough draft my peers and teacher helped tremendously. During my first rough draft I became very confused to what I should be doing and was not exactly sure where I was going with my paper. I was very lost, but with the help from my professors comments I was able to find sources that helped me uncover what I was really trying find out. I also made a reverse outline, which helped me unbelievably. My reverse outline helped me to reorganize my thoughts and see where paragraphs would work best in my paper, it also helped me pick out which paragraphs or sentences that really did not belong in my paper and helped me uncover new ideas to talk about in my paper. I found this also really helpful because I was able to jump around to different paragraphs rather than just working on them one at a time. I also made a "revision schedule" for my paper and this helped me to stay on track and to know how much I still needed to do. My teacher also gave me UW-Collages goals and Learning Outcomes and had highlighted many of the goals which I had missed during my rough draft. This helped me focus on what I really needed to work on. For example a goal that was highlighted was to "Cite research in an established documentation style." This made me very aware that I was not doing my MLA citations completely right and I was able to redo what I thought had been correct. Another goal that was highlighted was, "Support a thesis using credible, appropriate, accurate, and sufficient source material." After seeing this and reading my teachers comments I knew that a few sources I had used were not scholarly articles. So I found scholarly articles to support my claim instead. During my time in this course I really think I have developed critical thinking when it comes to my writing. In many classes I have been in I have not had to think very hard about the topic I was writing about and the instructions were very straight forward. In this class we read a lot of different essays that were much harder to grasp and our instructions were really to think critically about these articles and write about them. I also feel I have a better understanding for MLA citations now after doing this research paper. Lastly I feel like I have a much better knowledge of all of our college goals and learning outcomes, I am now able to cite MLA, research and analyze scholarly articles, integrate material into my research, and consider different aspects when researching. I feel my research paper and blog is contributing to the scholarly discourse by researching a topic that is not a very common researched item. I also feel I'm contributing strong scholarly evidence in my essay that helps to support my argument and that my essay could be very helpful to other students who may be looking into researching a topic like mine. This research paper has really given me an understanding of what a scholarly research paper should look like and has helped me to have confidence that I am able to write scholarly articles.