Dear past-Danielle,

I really wish you had known more about writing research papers before you started writing this one. You greatly underestimated the amount of time and effort it would take to write a clear, well-written paper about Princess Diana’s death.

First, you grossly underestimated how long it would take you to complete the annotated bibliography, which was only the first step of a long process. It took you around a week, give or take, to find your sources and annotate them. By the end of the paper, you hadn’t even used the annotated sources more than once. I hope you know how long it takes to write a sufficient annotated bibliography, as well as how much effort will be required. You also miscalculated how long it would take to complete the outline in a way that made sense. The purpose of the outline was to literally outline what you wanted to say in each paragraph. You clearly didn’t know just how much writing there was to be done. It took you a few days to figure out how you wanted to say what you said. Just know that the outline is easy if you know what you’re trying to say, and exactly what you’re trying to argue.

Well, past-Danielle, I truly hope you’ve taken my advice into close consideration. If you do, the process of writing your conspiracy theory essay will go very quickly. Please, know that writing your annotated bibliography will go smoothly if you know what to search for, and that you need to know exactly what you’re arguing in order to quickly finish the outline portion of the process.

Good luck!

Present/future-Danielle

Writing this research paper has been an emotional roller-coaster, to say the least. When I was choosing my topic, I thought there was going to be a lot more information out there about Princess Diana’s death than there actually is. There’s a lot of factual information that’s been put out by the media and the royal family, but finding the conspiracies has been more difficult than anticipated. So finding the sources has been difficult, which has only made trying to actually write the paper that much harder. It’s not the easiest thing to write a research paper on a topic you don’t know much about with little to no research to back you up. This coupled with the fact that I already don’t enjoy writing has made for a pretty miserable and unproductive experience. To make matters worse, once you get behind in this class, it’s hard to catch back up. I don’t really have any research done, and it was due over a week ago. I have a lot of research (and catching up) to do.

For my conspiracy theory research project, I decided to do Princess Diana’s death; more specifically, whether or not the Royal family killed her or if it was actually an accident. I chose this topic because it was one I hadn’t heard of before looking at the list of choices and I felt like I would be able to be most impartial going into the research as opposed to researching the Tupac conspiracy theory, or the Illuminati conspiracy theory where I’m already familiar with “facts” regarding the topic. Plus, I know that Princess Diana was and still is beloved by people all around the world. I thought it would be fun to try and dig up the truth; whether that be what we already know or what the government has been hiding from us this entire time. The theory behind the conspiracy is that Princess Diana was not in fact killed in a car accident like the government wants us to believe. She was actually killed by the Royal family and the car accident was just a scapegoat.

The rhetorical analysis essay was more difficult than I believed it would be. I was under the impression that we would be able to have the ads in front of us while writing, so I didn’t complete the graphic organizer as completely as I should’ve. This caused a few different moments of panic as I writing; I kept forgetting what exactly I was trying to say. So while I didn’t include a lot of detail (because I didn’t know what the ads looked like), I still feel like it was coherent and easy to read, which is something I’ve struggled with in the past in terms of timed writing. I’ve definitely improved as a writer because of this assignment, however. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to look at an ad without analyzing which rhetorical devices it’s using.

Blog Post #2