As far as I can remember, the first time I had to write a type of research paper was either in the 7th or 8h grade. The English teacher asked us to write a paper on a historical figure who was involved or contributed to the American Civil War. This type of research would be so much different than the research papers I have written to this point in time. In the research paper, I would have started to write about his life as a child and how he would grow up to be a contributor to the historical event. Writing in the humanities is “the expressions of the human mind, and the purpose of writing in these fields is to explore and analyze aspects of the human experience across time and sometimes to create original works of literature”(Bullock et al. 307-308). Yet to that point in time, that’s all I had been doing in middle school English classes. Either that or reflective essays on the topic that had been discussed in class. Then came high school and college English, which bewildered me. The research in high school and college classes was challenging because it got the writer to come up with an opinion, and to use facts from different sources to back your opinion. 

In my English 2 class, we were assigned to write a research paper on a list of topics that were given. The topic that I chose was race and intelligence, which I did not know what it was about at the time. This type of research paper would require me to look at multiple scholarly articles to help back up my statement. In English 111, we were to write a similar research paper to the one I wrote in English 2, but for this one, we were supposed to come up with a topic that would be interesting to us. I chose a topic that was and still is relevant to teenagers and older children. The topic that I chose talked about how violent video games affect the minds of teenagers and older children, and also how they affect was shown through physiological and physical things. Both research papers were very similar in the way they were written and also how I gathered my information to the papers. 

In my English 112 class, we were asked to write a bibliography, discography, filmography, biography, or videography and I chose to write a biography. I chose this one because then I could write a list about my favorite tv shows and I would get to put this on my blog. This type of research would be to be informal research because I was not looking for articles to help back up my statement. The only research I had to do was looking up information about the show like for example, the producer and director. In The Norton Field Guide to Writing, chapters twenty-four through twenty-six talk about how in each academic field of study people view the information in different ways and analyze it differently. The writing would be done in a different tone and it would be done presenting information differently because they all would not look at certain information and interpret it as some who is doing a different study. It also gave examples about the writing in different academic studies, It showed me that the writing I have been doing it most closely set up to that of someone who is doing something in science. The chapters showed me different types of writing that are very different from others, but I think that writing in the humanities and the sciences interested me more. 

All the research that I have conducted to this point is very different because of how they are set up and how the viewpoints could be different. I have written reflections/research papers in middle school and high school English classes, I have written more in-depth research papers about a certain viewpoint. The research papers that I have written were similar to one another and the TVography was a different one. It was different because the TVography focused on my favorite TV shows and I didn’t need to research anything. The chapters in the book informed me about how in each academic field has its way of viewing and interpreting the information, which affects how they are going to write and present the information. This made me look at the types of writing I have been doing to this point and also what academic field interests me. The writing that I have been doing so far is very similar to that of the type of writing done in the sciences and humanities.

Work Cited

Bullock, Richard, et al. Chapter 26: “Writing in Academic Fields of

Study.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and

Handbook. 5th ed. Norton, 2019. pp. 294-304. PDF.