When I first wrote my close reading essays, I spent hours combing through scholarly articles on JSTOR and other databases, reading each work from front to back. Although helpful with producing relevant quotes or ideas to use in my prose, this strategy prevented me from […]
Day: November 17, 2025
Primary Source Research Journal
When I started writing my very first close reading essay, I already had an inkling of an idea for a theme to explore throughout the semester. I deliberately chose Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” because they both redefined aspects […]
Research Journal #2: The Unexpected Challenges of Secondary Sources
Intro: Although my search for secondary sources proved to be less difficult than my search for primary sources, it still challenged me in unexpected ways. Where most sources were relatively easy to find, some took me much longer to discover than I anticipated. In this […]
Research Journal #1: Patience and Primary Sources
Intro: Although I had a strong idea as to what my final essay was going to be about, my research process was anything but simple. I chose to focus on the poems, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” […]