Blog 6 - Advisory Prep

My general reaction to the project so far.

1. What has worked well for you concerning senior project this year?  What has made it a positive experience for you? 
The research checks, they do me the most good. I sort of take a day to scour the internet looking for things I might be interested in surrounding my topic. I leave all of the links on a doc and every week for research check I just take two of the links I have saved. During research check when I’m writing notes I add extra notes an questions for myself for the topics that interested me most. Right now, thats’s the most important thing to me. I want to know what, specifically, I am going to be learning about. I really like the freedom of the sources. For example, I can get a lot of information about an author from an interview with them. It makes it easier to compare their writing to their personality when I can hear their voice and tone. I also really really REALLY like the fact that I know that my essential question can be more creative and less formal and stifled.

2. What are you finding difficult concerning senior project?  How can you adapt to make that portion work better for you?  How might the senior team help?

Since the senior team explained that our essential questions can be a lot more creative than last years, I’ve been having trouble knowing my limits. During the summer I made an essential question that was more formal. I used what I had seen from last year as examples of how to write it. It hadn’t made me very happy because I felt that my senior project wasn’t interesting anymore. But now, I don’t know how to write it. How creative is too creative? Can I ask questions like “what does the inside of an authors head look like when writing a book?” or is that too out there? What if I want to ask “How does a person choose a book to read?” but I want to talk about the readers opinions, not the analysis of book covers and sales rates? I want my project to be creative and filled with ideas and opinions. I want to present and feel the excitement and intrigue, something I felt was lacking last year. I want to know if I will still be able to come up with a good essential question and keep my creative ideas alive.

And more on that subject, what if the answers I find at the end of my project are more opinion based? Writing is not something that can be put down as fact. Writing styles are always changing from author to author. Even the rules of grammar can shift after a few years or an especially influential book is released. Do my answers need to be based on fact? Wouldn’t that mean that I would need to change my focus to something more definite?