journal 26

            Project three has been a journey; taking all of the new techniques we’ve learned in the past two papers and using them to bring this paper alive and show its meaning. Honestly, to me, paper 3 was almost harder to put together, but easier to show its meaning. Veering away from the idea of food and the meaning it has in our lives, we began to talk and write about our change in lifestyle going through a major pandemic. Although the first two papers were something, we all related to with food being a major aspect in our lives, paper three is something we are all living through as we speak. We are writing about the thoughts are currently thinking, the emotions we are feeling, the struggles we are experiencing, and the changes we are always making. Due to this, I feel as though this is a paper that had so many thoughts, I had no idea what to do with them. I found myself writing down a bunch of ideas, and then later going back and trying to reorganize them. While although I feel like this paper still had a lot to revise, it wasn’t nearly as much as I needed to do in the past because I had a clear idea of what I was trying to get across, and I knew a lot about how to use quotes and structure my paper the way that sounded best. With that in mind, I did spend several days going back and revisiting this piece and looking at what others had to say about it. I still needed to focus on sentence structure and revisiting my thesis, but when it came to reflecting back on quotes or introducing a piece of my life into this piece it came a lot easier. I had a thesis that I wasn’t 100% sure on, but then as I finished my paper, I was able to go back and find the true point I was trying to get across, and my peers allowed me to see that as well. When I had this set-in stone, I was able to go back into my essay and elaborate and connect each quote to my own life experiences directly. This is probably due to the fact that I have a lot of opinion on this topic because I am living through it myself and have had to make many adjustments throughout the months this has been going on. I spent a lot of time on finding ways to allow my voice and opinion to be heard, and that was one of the most difficult aspects of this paper for me. I could have written on and on about so many different topics but once I had all my ideas down on paper, I was able to settle to one main idea and elaborate off of that. Focusing one day on the global revisions and another on local revisions was a huge help rather than focusing on the whole piece for one day. Overall, this paper was very eye opening and putting all of our learned techniques to work was, in the end, very rewarding.