Anna's Blog

       For the rational argument assignment, I chose to write about depression. My paper is about depression not being as recognized or respected as physical issues simply because it is not clearly visible. I chose this for a few different reasons. For starters, I personally suffer from depression and I felt that I could definitely connect to this topic. It has been over 3 years now since I developed depression, and during that time I have learned and experienced a lot related to the matter. For example, kids are briefly taught about depression in health classes at school, but at least my school did not go into much depth with the topic. Since we were covering other materials, we only had time to talk about extreme cases of depression. When I developed depression not long after, it was nothing like what we had learned. In fact, it was nothing like anything I had ever been taught about it in my life. I noticed a lot of things once I did develop it, though. One of thos...

       When we visited the library for the second time, we learned about scholarly research. I learned a lot that day that I will be carrying with me throughout my time in college and even beyond. For starters, I never would have thought that Wikipedia could actually be helpful for research. Wikipedia being capable of anything good revolving around research goes against everything I was taught in middle school and high school. I was also once again not aware of how helpful the library can actually be.      Throughout all of middle school and high school, we are taught that Wikipedia is bad and we should not even think about going near it when doing research. I did not realize that it actually had something truly helpful to offer. For the last 4 years or more, the only purpose I have used Wikipedia for is looking up movies, reading about their statistics and performances, and reading their plots. I had no idea it could actually be useful. We were taught...

    Last week the class spent the entirety of the period in a room in the library to learn about researching. While I was not able to stay for the entire class, I was able to stay for the first hour. During that hour I feel that I learned a lot. I am very familiar with basic researching. Not only did I do it all the time in high school and even before, but I love researching my own topics on my own time outside of school. I get curious about random topics, and I love searching for the answers in books and on the internet. I started picking up on how to tell which sources were more credible than others. I even researched how to properly research several times to pick up on more techniques and skills. Still, I was not aware of everything we learned in the library that day and I am glad I was able to hear it.      First of all, I learned new techniques about searching for the most credible sources. I also learned that those most credible sources will always be acce...

      I had a very hard time coming up with a research topic because I could not think of something that was a real problem that I truly felt connected to. I thought about doing a number of smaller topics that do not have as great of an impact in the world, but sort of connect with me. I finally decided on a topic, but ultimately chose very late.      At first I was going through various small problems. The example in class was about cars and headlights. Honestly that sort of threw me off a bit, because I immediately was trying to find a problem in the real world that matched that as far as severity was concerned. In the end, I started to give up on that. I still couldn't think of a topic though. I thought about continuing my microtheme, which was about procrastination. The problem was that I could barely write one page about procrastination, and I knew I would certainly not be able to write about it for 4 to 6 pages.      Eventually I decide...

       The weather today has been extremely rainy and crummy, which has been a consistency throughout the last couple of weeks. It is becoming hard for me to deal with it, and I am struggling to go about my daily activities with the rain continuing so much. Despite my love for fall, this time of year is always a challenge for me for multiple reasons. For starters, I am currently commuting, which is much harder with the rain. Another issue the rain brings is more personal, relating to my depression.      I am currently a commuter who has a 45 minute drive to get to campus, and I have to plan that into my day. It becomes much harder for me to drive when it is raining because it is harder to see the road. It is also harder to actually drive on the road in those conditions. Another issue is that the faster you drive, the less you are able to see in the rain. This means that I have to slow way down in order to be able to safely drive to school in the mornin...

        So far I have made a lot of progress on my documentary project. I have been able to get a significant ways through the writing process and get a lot done. However, it has been hard balancing this project with other projects at school. I have been assigned many projects, some of which being given similar due dates. It has been very hard to balance school with my personal life, and I have had to prioritize certain assignments over others. Unfortunately, I have had to give some of my other projects more attention than my documentary project recently. The due date for the final version of the documentary project paper is not for a while compared to some of my other assignments. Due to this, I have had to put other assignments ahead of this one. I have given this project as much attention as possible given my current schedule, but I am looking forward to focusing more on this paper once my other projects are out of the way. With the fall break coming up, many...