Tentative Topic for Research Essay

I'm really not too sure what my topic is going to be as of right now.  I'm considering doing something about living healthy (working out and eating right regularly) because I am interested in that.  The only thing is that I wouldn't be quite sure how to make that into a Research essay with a question and interesting information etc.  I could also do an essay on Multiple Sclerosis because my mom has been diagnosed with the disease for as long as I can remember.  That would be interesting to know more about! But, yep not too sure yet, still brainstorming ideas.

Reading Response #2

In my opinion, both Amy Garret-Brown and Jay Holmquist provide surprisingly intriguing essays while presenting a research topic simultaneously.  Both essays are not just pieces of writing that go on monotonously about a research topic; but provide interesting facts and also captivating stories for the reader to enjoy.  After reading both essays, the reader can easily grasp how a research essay is different from a research paper.  Ballenger describes what both authors accomplished almost perfectly, in this quote from Chapter 11, “The Research essay is much more likely to encourage the habits of mind that encourage genuine inquiry, including suspending judgment, beginning with questions not answers, and accepting ambiguity as a natural part of the process.” 

The overall controlling idea of Amy’s essay, “Why Do People Tan” is her question of why people would choose fake tanning in a bed over enjoying the natural bliss of the sun outside.  She wanted to find out what was so compelling about lying in a plastic bed full of UV bulbs and “…waste money and time on a prepaid tan that will only result in prematurely leathered skin and a much higher risk of developing melanoma or other skin cancers.”  She researches the topic and finds that most of the authors hold a thumbs down for fake tanning and natural tanning (something that she doesn’t necessarily consider bad for herself).  She finds that “2/3 of the teens say they look better with a tan and feel healthier, more sophisticated and 50 percent say they looked more athletic”, in a survey conducted by Seventeen magazine.  Throughout her essay, Amy transitions (through research) from the idea that “a nice tan once meant you spent your days on the beach playing volleyball and swimming…it was usually accompanied by fit and trim bodies and healthy smiles.  Now it means you spent 45$ a month building a base tan” to her final conclusion that, “people just like the way it looks to be tan.”  By the end of her story she even admits that she feels better about herself when she’s not “starkly white” and that “it just feels good to be in the sun.” 

The overall controlling idea of Jay Holmquist’s essay is that regardless of what some people might say about drugs, they are not safe and could eventually wind you up in a casket.  He begins the essay by introducing a crazy story about him and his friend, Eric, in a rave scene where they are offered for the first time to do acid.  He ends the short story there and diverges into his “research” aspect of the essay, leaving the reader hungry for more and motivated to finish the whole essay.  (A good writing tactic when your audience is a group of eighteen year-old English students who tend to have an attention span of about three seconds).  Holmquist spends the next few pages discussing multiple drugs that he has researched and really gives the reader a feel for what effect they might have on a person.  For someone who has never been involved in drugs and is unaware of all the different types of drugs and pills out there, it is a very interesting and informative topic.  I enjoyed this essay the best and did not even mind that it was much longer than Amy’s essay.  I like how he starts off the short story in the beginning of the essay and then finishes it at the very end, after he inputs all of the research that he has done.   He also adds a slight spin to the conclusion when he explains, “That’s why I don’t do them any more.  I like them too much…” He mixes a negative and positive sentence together and still manages to get his point across while smoothly summing up his topic.

             Amy makes her essay fresh for the reader by adding her own voice in and keeping the essay interesting.  By saying things like “…who made it cool for white people to be tan?”  She introduces her young voice and you immediately can tell that it is not going to be a boring essay.  Then she moves into her facts about tanning that she has learned while including her question if the natural sun should also be your enemy, and tops it all off with a conclusions that “there must be some middle ground”.  She provides hip talk and sturdy facts all in the same essay, therefore making her research essay a perfect example for us.  Holmquist does an even more exquisite job at incorporating both an interesting story and real facts about the dangers of drug use in his essay by providing a small story about his friend Eric’s near death experience, and stupidity to use again after the occurrence, and also writing many facts and statistics for the reader to gasp at.

            By reading these two essays and what Ballenger has to say about writing a research paper in “The Curious Writer”, I have gained a good feel for how a successful research paper should be organized and developed and have a slight idea as to how I am going to begin to write it.  

Reading Response #1

Both Hogg and Black effectively demonstrate multiple features of the form that Ballenger talks about.  First of all, both of the stories are written as Personal essays in the first person and show no “pretense of scientific objectivity”.  Both stories are easy to connect with and follow because of their accessible underlying themes and “down-to-earth” vibes.  Since they are both written about a personal story that actually took place in the author’s life, the stories are easy to relate to and also interesting to read.  Ballenger also talks about how “the subject is often commonplace” in a personal essay.  In both “I’m a Believer” and “The Joy of Mud” the subjects very much deal with the drama of everyday life and the events presented throughout the stories are quite tangible to the reader.  The topics in both stories are “humble” and not too “out there”.  In “I’m a Believer”, Hogg describes herself as a giddy young girl with a juvenile crush on a “big” rock star named Davy from ‘The Monkees’ back in the day, only to discover in her future that he really was only as great as she dreamt him up to be.  In the beginning of the story, she writes, “I listened to the Monkees Greatest Hits album nearly every day, playing the songs where Davy sings lead, pulling the record needle again and again to the beginning of “Daydream Believer” where he speaks with his British accent…”, expressing her sheer admiration and child-like crush on the British Rock-star. As the story nears the end, she describes the last concert she attended, when she was much older, where he gave her an autograph. “As I watch him write ‘David’ not ‘Davy’, I accept finally, that this person I know so well I don’t really know at all, and I, the daydream believer, am just a fan.”  The topic is not overly dramatic and is actually quite amusing once you finish the story.  In “The Joy of Mud”, the title says it all.  The story is actually about just that; the joy of mud to the author, Catherine Black.  The theme of her story is how working in the mud opened her eyes and presented her with a deep and passionate connection between her and her hometown that she had never experienced before in her sixteen years of living on the island of Hawaii.  Although the subject is indeed “commonplace”, the story is quite intriguing and provides a much deeper main idea to the reader.  Another commonality that both stories share with the ideas of Ballenger is the narrative aspect.  Both stories are written as personal narratives and include their personal experiences and observations.  In “I’m a Believer”; Hogg describes events that go on in her life from when she was just a child all the way to her mid-twenties.  In “The Joy of Mud”, Black talks about the life-changing epiphany that she experiences while working in the fields of Hawaii and what it means to her.  “I had always prided myself on being rootless, yet here I was experiencing rootedness in the most literal sense of the word, and loving it in spite of myself.  Dirty, sweating, and sun-burned, I felt solid and more connected to the living, breathing world around me than I could remember.”  Both of the stories also share the quality in which “the thesis can be implicit, and it frequently emerges late, rather than at the beginning of an essay.”  Both of the stories are about coming to know something and learning a lesson and in both of the stories, insight is earned later rather than at the start of the story.  In Hogg’s narrative, it takes her twenty-something years to realize that her childhood idol is not all that she cracked him up to be.  In Black’s piece, the author goes sixteen years before discovering how truly special her island that she calls home really is.  Both of the pieces tell stories and rely “heavily on details” of their experiences in life.  I would also agree that both stories are based mostly on the author’s memories and observations, like Ballenger describes.  Hogg talks about her admiration for Davy when she was younger and then follows through with a concert she excitedly attends when she is much older and wiser, which leads to the main idea of the story and the dying-down of her childhood obsession with the British rocker.  Black discusses how she spent most of her life growing up in Hawaii disconnected from the island and longing to expand her horizons, when ultimately she realizes that the most beautiful horizon is the one she’s been lucky enough to view every morning for the past sixteen years but hasn’t realized it until now.  I didn’t really find any differences between Ballenger’s features and the two pieces.  To me, the “so what” of Hogg’s and Black’s essays is something that you spend chasing (in Hogg’s case) or trying to escape (in Blacks case) your whole life, might not be what you think.  Hogg spent her childhood daydreaming about dreamy Davy and obsessing over his British accent and later found out that he really is just another person like her and everybody else.  But instead of leaving the concert with shattered dreams, Hogg realizes that maybe her childhood fantasy will always be better than reality when she finally comes face to face with him.  “I realize that I could probably drink and gamble with Davy all night long if I tried to.  But of course I already know that would ruin what magic remains.”  Black on the other hand spends her adolescents avoiding her Hawaiian roots “floating on the peripheries of an island home (she) never cared for…” and ends up “…(snapping) straight back into its cool green heart,” after working in the Hawaiian fields one sunny, summer day.