John Martinez Chapter 5 Reading Response

This chapter, unlike the prior that we read for class, was actually fairly helpful. In high school, you don't do much in terms of research for essays in projects. While you may be asked to do some research for a project, it rarely goes beyond some internet sources for a paper. I can only recall once that I was required to go far more in-depth for a paper, which was a research paper for my AP courses that counted as my final. Besides that outlier, I never did through research or even chose a topic for myself to write about. Brainstorming a topic is actually fairly similar to how I was taught to brainstorm for creative writing. Some minor research, followed by freewriting and later mapping out what you want to write is very similar. Doing research isn't something new to me, as we were often told to use reputable sources such as government websites and organizations to gather information. Acknowledging opposing viewpoints is something I rarely see in papers from high school, so it was good to see the book acknowledge that there may be other viewpoints and that one viewpoint may not necessarily be "correct". Seeing how to do a research proposal was certainly interesting, it is something I haven't had to do before in high school. It seemed simple enough based on how the book explained to make one. With keeping sources organized, keeping bookmarks is certainly a good way to keep track of sources, though I find keeping links and content on a word document to be easier. Personally, this was actually a pretty good chapter, it does a good job explaining how to explore topics, research, and create a research proposal, as well as organizing sources. I feel this is going to be very useful for our next project, so I am glad I read it.