Research Essay Stuff

For our research essay Mr. Eagan presented us with two example essays that we were supposed to read and go over in class. The first essay that we went over was about credibility of child witnesses. Throughout this essay this person did many good things that we should incorporate into our research essays; at least I am going to in mine. Their introduction paragraph was very well done according to Mr. Eagan, so we should take note of that. They introduced the topic to us and included some research with it. Their thesis statement stated what they believed (main claim) and three things that they would be covering throughout their essay. I asked Mr. Eagan in class if three things to cover was a good number or was it okay if we had more... he said three was perfect and easy to follow in an essay. Starting off their essay, they define things for their "audience" that may be confusing. That is another thing we should focus on in our research essay is who we are writing for and who our audience is. We have to remember that we are not writing for little children or scholars so some things need to be defined and other things do not. Also in their essay they had a phrase that most of us were confused about and that was "et al" after an authors name in a citation. Mr. Eagan explained to us that we can use this when there are more than a certain amount of authors for a source, so we do not have to list them all and take space up in our paper. One thing that needed to be improved in the paper was transitions into each body paragraph. Some transitions that I am going to use in my research paper are furthermore, additionally, pursuing this further, specifically, and a few others. In class we talked about the lengths of the paragraphs in this example essay and no length is right or wrong as long is the point gets across and it is not too vague. Mr. Eagan said not to use simple words like "a great way". Instead of "a great way" it should be something like "the best way". Those are just small details that we need to focus on to make our research paper read smoothly and clearly.

This person also added an adequate amount of research, while not using too much. They put in a block quote where it fit well and there was one point where there was something that was not cited correctly and we need to keep an eye out for that in our papers. Throughout the paper the writer used words that were presented in the thesis statement, which kept our attention on those topics and helped us understand them better. In our papers we should do the same by using words in our thesis throughout our entire paper. The conclusion of the essay summed up the whole essay pretty well which is something we need to do too and not confuse our audience. What did you think about this paper? I thought it was very well done!