Category Archives: Reflections

Critical Research Paper Reflection

In the research paper, “Childhood Dreams to Adulthood Reality,” the genre is writing a paper that is persuading the audience how my topic is arguable and providing outside sources to help respond to prompt three. It is investigating how Freud psychoanalysis concepts discussed are connected to Oates’s work, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” through Connie’s perspective. In addition, Coulthard and Gillis further my analysis and clearly explained the concepts discussed in Oates’s story.

  This paper includes brief quotes from Freud, Coulthard, Gillis, and Oates’s literature. Using an academic tone in my analysis and context shows that I am not influenced by my emotions but supporting my claim by using the evidence found in multiple literacies texts. I wrote this research paper via Office Word and it’s split up into five paragraphs. Three of the main paragraphs introduce and briefly explain Freudian concepts and outside sources I am using to support my thesis. Honestly, prompt three wasn’t my first choice along with this story. At the beginning, I was going to respond to prompt one, unnamed narrators and was going to use Poe’s story “The Black Cat”. However, this was a difficult task since I already wrote my exploratory essay and I couldn’t squeeze any more information out of it. As a result, I decided to switch to prompt three, the writer’s opinion on society and I was going to use the book, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison. Alas, I decided I wasn’t going to use that since I was unmotivated to analyze that text. So, I reread the prompts again and noticed I can use the story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. I believe this was the right choice for me since no one read this story and there was a good number of outside sources about this piece of literature. By finalizing this, it helps me realize that I work better when I feel motivated to read and analyze a piece of writing. Although it did take me a while to understand and analyze Oates’s ideas and connect them with Freud, I gain confidence in my writing when I gave my presentation and people started to ask meaningful questions about it. The purpose of writing this paper is to examine/interpret a piece of literature and connect it to Freud’s ideas of psychoanalysis and include outside sources to make it more accurate. The potential audience for this paper was scholars who peered review my paper and offered me good advice. In addition, my two instructors who assigned this assignment.

While developing this paper, my viewpoint was primarily in the third person. I believe the relationships between me, the audience, and the medium are that we all have general to intermediate knowledge about Freud and his lectures. On the other hand, my classmates have little to no knowledge about my main text, so I had to describe the events as much as I can without making the paper sound like a summary. To have my essay get access to my audience, I submitted this essay on a word document, so it could be easily sharable to my peers and professors. Plus, I presented a presentation in front of my scholars and professor to give them a slight insight into what I was researching.

As usual, I had all my ideas, but I couldn’t efficiently make them into a statement that will tie up this whole paper. With the help of my tutor, we came up with a good thesis statement. However, based on peer reviews I had, I haven’t gotten much feedback since they haven’t read this story before, but they gave me feedback about how I should be formatting my paragraphs and how clear my sentences sound. It was great feedback and I found it helpful.