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I have been to the Library of Congress five times, and am going tomorrow. It is a wonderful resource, and so convenient. I am ashamed I have not made use of it before now. EN501 should be mandatory for beginning graduate students. Somehow I slipped by without it and am now nearing completion of my degree. The processes I have learned in this course will no doubt help me in the future, and I will be able to pass them on to my students. I have never written from an outline, and find it is new waters. No one writes the same. It would be a sad thing if everyone did. But I find that not working from an outline increases the amount of revision I must do to get a cohesive product. This course has been difficult for me because of this. Although I understand the process, it is hard to put it into practice when I am used to going through the difficult write-freak out-revise process.

At the onset of my research I found numerous articles from the MLA database, accessed them and read them, and re-read them. Only a few of these sources found themselves in my final research paper, but I learned new ideas, and new vocabulary. I cannot think that it was a waste. One essay in particular I could not let go of. It was Elisabeth Gitter’s “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination,” and although it was off my topic of the eighteenth century, I found it to be fascinating, knowledgeable, and well-written. I may use it as a spring board for my final thesis project.

I have also learned something of the many resources available for writers and teachers, which I would like to explore further, like Zotero and ManyEyes. I found and explored a new way to do presentations with Prezi, although I realize that I am a neophyte. I would like to take the time to explore this further. One important lesson I have learned is to use sources to find other sources. It helps to have a very knowledgeable enthusiastic professor; I only wish I had taken this course sooner. I have not put everything I have learned into practice, but the stress would be less if I did so I will keep my Booth text for future reference in my career as an educator. This has been a rigorous course, but it has been well worth it.

For my final essay I thought I was researching hair, but it turned out I was researching a lot more than hair. On the way I learned many interesting facts about hair, but I soon branched out into the subject of rape. Much of what I acquired in the way of learning had to be sorted out into the dust bin, they were not in keeping with my final essay. I discovered it is all a learning process, like life.

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