When getting the assignment assigned to me I thought I was going to have to spend every moment of the day on the essay. It was a bit scary to go from writing 3 page papers to writing 7 to 8 pages. However, when the work was divided I felt a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders. The division of the work made it easier for me to visualize what I had to do and get it done. The first thing we had worked on was the proposal for our essay. This part of the essay wasn’t as simple as I had thought it was going to be. I had imagined the proposal to be a short overview of why we choose the topic and what our essay was going to be about but it was a lot more than that. We had to write about our research and incorporate our research questions into it. Before starting the essay I was sure that I wanted to write about a type of puppet. As I continued learning more about what the essay consisted of I decided to change my topic to puppetry in young education. When starting my proposal I wanted to get straight to the point and I think that might have given my essay a rushed feeling. I talked about why I believed that using puppetry in the classroom could be useful. I also mentioned in some ways that puppetry can help those children that have disabilities. Looking back I wish I would have included more about this topic. After the proposal I worked on the annotated bibliography. The annotated bibliography seemed simple enough, but there were some complications with the citations of the sources. It was surprisingly easy for me to find the sources I needed. I didn’t think that there was going to be such a large amount of articles and books that talk about how puppetry helps children in education.

      While writing the actual essay, I was very conflicted on how to start and how to organize my essay. I don’t remember ever doing a research paper so this was definitely new for me. It almost felt like an argumentative essay because of the rebuttal. In argumentative essays you choose a side in an argument and defend it using facts and knowledge. However in the expository essay we had to research the topic and write about the things we had found. It was quite difficult for me to do this because I feel that research is only fun if you love the topic. While I did find the topic to be interesting, I didn’t love it and I feel that this most likely shows in my essay. I started my essay by talking about some of the improvements we have made in the past. I related this to how we should improve the school curriculums by adding puppetry into it. My peer-review partner suggested that I change my introduction because they believed it didn’t fit well into the essay. I reviewed my introduction and decided to keep it just the way it was. Throughout the essay I struggled with being conclusive, I found it very hard to not input my opinions into the essay. Regarding the organization of my essay, I first wrote about the experiences that different cultures have had with puppetry in their schools. I then wrote about how puppetry is used to help teach the kids that have disabilities. After that I spoke about any possible reasons why somebody might disagree with my point of view. In my conclusion I felt that I could have done a better job of recapping what was talked about in my essay. My understanding of the MLA formatting has definitely grown. I am now much more familiar with how to cite and how to do a work cited page. I didn’t keep track of how much time I had worked on my essay before Mr. Ewan had told us to do so. When I did keep track I spent around 8 hours on the essay, before that I don’t know the exact amount of hours I spent writing and fixing my essay.

      I think that this essay really challenged me and make me work harder in my writing than I ever have before. Although I didn’t absolutely love my topic, I did enjoy learning about the change that puppets can make on students learning.