Research Essay Reflection
For my research paper, I really wanted to write about a subject that I was passionate about, and I found one that I thought wasn’t really talked about enough. For the past couple years, I’ve noticed that there was a considerable amount of backlash towards film director and actress Olivia Wilde. It started when she began seeing popstar Harry Styles. Of course, since one of the world’s largest stars got into a relationship, there’s bound to be some talk from the media. But unfortunately, it went too far. Wilde had already gained a negative bias towards her from the public’s jealousy and hate- and when she started to become more successful in her career, people did not support it. The hate seemed to stem mainly from misogyny- or rather, internalized misogyny. No claims against Wilde had sufficient evidence or relevance to be supported- yet they were. There is a very wide scope of this subject, so it was a little bit difficult to narrow down, but I found that I was able to do it anyways. I decided to tackle the issue of how the media often twists and manipulates information to fit a certain bias. Olivia Wilde truly did nothing wrong, and did not deserve to be attacked the way she was by the media; but because the media had the opportunity to get recognized for speaking on this controversial topic, they did. Throughout my research process, the thing that I found most difficult was finding academic or peer reviewed sources that I could use to support my argument. I began writing this essay with a very specific argument relating to only one subject- so it was impossible to find any academic papers written solely about the Olivia Wilde controversy. I found that the closest thing that I could use were studies relating to arguments that I suggested had a link to the Olivia Wilde controversy. I chose topics relating to the way women are treated differently by the media, statistics relating to gender equality in the film industry, examples of misrepresentation of women in the media, and a study on how women aren’t taken as seriously if they have higher ambitions (relating to the film industry). The sources that seemed most useful to me would probably needed to have been the few I was able to find in the Capilano University library site. These were academic peer reviewed sources, and they supported my thesis very well. While writing, I found it most difficult to find creative transitions from one idea to the next, but I found that bringing in information from a reliable source often helped me to transition from one idea to the next. I did this by linking a quote from one source to a faintly similar claim from a different source. This helped me move from topic to topic in a concise and understandable manner.
For the review factor of my research draft, I did find it a little difficult to get feedback from my classmates. Some of the people I agreed to switch papers with didn’t end up reviewing mine, but I still got some useful feedback from people. I think that one of the major issues I had was with my idea transitions, but also with my MLA citations. An example of how my citation looked like before reviewing it would be this one:
Hennefeld, Maggie. “FEMINIST FILMMAKING AND THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL FILM POLITICS: WOMEN’S CINEMA, WORLD CINEMA: PROJECTING CONTEMPORARY FEMINISMS.” Cultural Critique, no. 99, spring 2018, pp. 194+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549271510/LitRC?u=nort83486&sid=ebsco&xid=110a7bab. Accessed 20 Oct. 2022.
This citation has a lot of mistakes throughout- and after revising, I re-cited it to this:
Hennefeld, Maggie. “Feminist Filmmaking and The Future of Global Film Politics: Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms.” Gale Literature Resource Center, Spring 2018, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549271510/LitRC?u=nort83486&sid=ebsco&xid=110a7bab
Besides problems with MLA citations, I had another issue. This was that for the introduction of my paragraph, originally, I had a long paragraph that slowly led to the reveal of my topic and thesis. However, during the workshops I found that that introduction was a little bit too long, and I shaved it down for it to be more concise. After each workshop, I took every piece of advice into account and applied the suitable changes to my paper. With MLA, I found it difficult at times to find all the information that had to be used in each sources citation, but I think that it ended up working out. If I were to re-write this paper, I would try to find more sources so that I could have more options. I found that I wasn’t able to put as much time into the essay then I would have hoped to, so if I could I would definitely go back and work on my time management as well. Something I did to help with my review process was to read every concluding sentence of each paragraph, and see if it relates to the introduction sentence of the next paragraph. I found that this was the most useful way for me to improve my transitions between ideas.