Research Project

Adding graphs, images, stats?

2009-12-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

I was just reading Michelle's blog and she mentioned how she'd like to add a comic stip into her paper. Great idea! I have been so overwhelmed with the content of the paper that I didn't even stop to think about how pictures or graphs could benefit my paper.

I think I'll try to find some graphs showing certain statistics that I could reference in my paper. I have encountered a lot of statistical figures in my research that could strengthen the research-aspect of my paper. As a reader, I prefer to read articles containing images or graphical representations. So why not include them in my own writing?

Finishing Up

2009-12-03T07:20:00.001-08:00

I have about 12 pages of my research paper now. It has been a long, time-consuming journey. I am not as far into my paper as I'd like to be at this point, but I am confident I can have it completed by the due date. One of the main struggles I've had with this paper is time management. As a writer, I take especially long to write papers because I edit and revise each sentence as I am writing. Due to this odd writing behavior, it sometimes takes 10 minutes to construct 2-3 perfect sentences. I have never been able to spit out a rough draft and then take the time and edit and revise it. Because of the required length of this paper, writing the way I do had made this paper a VERY long process for me.

For the most part, I am pretty satisfied with the quality of my paper. The research was very interesting and has inspired me (even more) to get involved in the struggle to end homelessness. Up to this point, I have mainly focused on homelessness in the United States. I would like to write about homelessness in other developed countries and see how it compares to the U.S.. I am still unsure how I'll wrap it up, we'll see when we get there.

Playing Catch-Up

2009-11-16T09:29:00.000-08:00

Sorry everyone for seriously lacking in my blogging. Here is the status of my research paper.

I began my paper by explaining homelessness in very general, vague terms. I tried exploring many different facets of homelessness in general, which turned out to be sort of disorganized. I dug into some more research and expanded my resources beyond the basic "all about homelessness" style of books I checked out from the library. I found a lot of different articles and research studies that centered on a particular idea or topic such as sexual exploitation among homeless youth. I found these articles to be EXTREMELY helpful in developing a more structured paper. I was really interested in the stories and articles I was reading and ended up writing a bigger chunk than I had expected to write on youth homelessness. The information I found opened up new things to explore such as personal accounts of youth homelessness and human trafficking.

As for now, I'm going to keep the first disorganized section of my paper. While wrapping up my paper, I'll probably reorganize my paper by cutting and pasting chunks of information, adding or deleting transitional information. I think once I have the entire paper written, it will be easier to move things around to shape the paper as a whole.

Homelessness

2009-10-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

I will be using this blog as a journal for my research project. I have decided to conduct my research on homelessness. I realize that this is a very vague and broad topic right now, but I hope that with some further research, I will discover a more narrow topic that I can center my research on.

I've always been intrigued by homelessness. Why is it still present with such wealth and development in the world? Even as a little girl walking with my parents to a Red's game, we'd walk by a homeless man and it would deeply affect me. His sadness and undignified appearance would haunt me for days. The high rates of poverty and homeless truly shake me.

I'd like to find out more about the history of homelessness and its effect on the societies in which it exists. I understand that "homelessness" may have many different meanings depending on how developed a country is. I think I would focus my research on more developed countries because they have the resources to put an end to homelessness.

I am still not 100% passionate about keeping this as my research topic. I have a hopeful wish that some extraordinary research topic will come to me that I will be more enthusiastic about. I am open to suggestions if anyone has any.