Reflection

Now this is a story, all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down, And I’d like to take a minute just sit right there, I’ll tell how you I came to write a newsletter on key terms.

Okay, so kind of a cheesy introduction and I know the ending does not rhyme, but I just couldn’t help myself! I will, however, keep true and tell you how I came to write this newsletter on “circulation.”
When I was first introduced to the topic, I had thought, “Okay, no big deal, and three drafts? This should be a piece of cake!” Obviously I was very wrong, and the amount of frustration that came with this project was much unanticipated. At first, I thought circulation could not be that hard to define, and I kept thinking of cool examples I could use to entice the freshman audience, however, this proved to be of no help whatsoever when it came to actually doing the project. My first night doing the brainstorm was utter failure, to say the least. I kept getting sites on the circulation system, or the circulation of air, or other weird science terms that I have no knowledge of. I came into class, not too worried, but still a bit confused.
To be honest, I had not done much leg work outside of class, again thinking that it would not be too time consuming coming up with the end result. The day we workshoped in class was very helpful for me because not only did I see I should get on top of the researching with the project, but also that it was not as easy as I thought it would be. To me, this was the most daunting task of all. I should have mentioned earlier my great disdain for researching, but it is what made me put off this assignment for so long. To me, it’s different if I am reflecting back on something I’ve been told to read, or if I am creating the words off the top of my head, but to me looking for what I want to analyze, is just too painful for me. I know it may sound childish, but I just can’t get over that. After being able to point out once source (and creating my first draft) I noticed that I still needed way more sources and information if I was going to hit the word count criteria. I then asked Kara for help, who pointed me to two sources (one which I had used, which I thought was excellent, because I had at least done something right!). The other source was a book, which I went and checked out, but didn’t get past the second chapter. I decided to take a look at the works cited from the first source and look up articles from there. I ended up relating to two other sources that I took from the works cited and being able to work from there.
Now, don’t get me wrong, of course it may seem as if I had done this very efficiently, but I did not. It might have taken me about thirty minutes to search for one author, then about an hour to read, and another thirty to look up the other (I reward myself with lots of breaks, and also find ANYTHING to distract myself with). After doing so, I was able to (with the help of many breaks) get a complete product! The actual writing of it was not as daunting as the researching aspect (at least for me) but it definitely was an interesting task. All in all, I think the newsletter worked out pretty well, considering I want to target an audience that potentially has to have the slightest bit of interest in the topic at hand to pick up the newsletter in the first place. I definitely think I could have done a better job with the wording of it, to make it more appealing to the audience, but the task was hard enough, and I am also the harshest critic I know.
So there you go, that’s more or less my story of how “my life got turned, flipped upside down”, okay not really, but it felt that way for a little bit!