Assignment 2

The essay "Building a Mystery" by Robert Davis and Mark Shadle provides alternative ways to compose a research paper.  They argue that there is more ways to write a "research paper" other than the ways textbooks and our teachers have taught us in the past.  On page 419 of their essay, they talk about how a research assignment teaches a student to only produce an assignment without really thinking about it.  What I take from this statement is something that I myself am guily of.  Just researching a topic and getting enough information to fill up the page, but never really taking a deep look into everything I just researched and truly forming my own opinion on the topic.  This is the easy way out of writing an essay and I know that I'm not the only one who is guilty of doing this on a few assignments.  I feel that this is the reason why they are arguing about the ways to write a research paper.  They say that facts and expository writing have limits and you can only inquire so much.  They believe that there should be deeper inquiry, with no limits at all, and I agree with their opinion.  I believe that they think their model for research essays is "better" because it allows their students to use multiple genres to incorporate different ideas into their projects.  They do this by using multi-genre/media/disciplinary/cultural research based projects.  It said that they have had people turn projects in that incorporated video clips, visual arts, and my personal favorite example was of the student who brought a project in the back of a pickup truck.  From a students perspective, I feel like we're all afraid of the word "research paper", everyone dreads it.  It just seems like a long 10 page paper that no one wants to write.  But using these different methods to create a research paper would allow people to think differently than they have with previous papers that they've had to write.  I feel that using these different strategies to analyze research gives us more diverse ideas as students, and it has no boundaries.