Friday the 13th of April, 2012 is a day that will
live in infamy.
Why, you ask?
It’s the day I found out I had failed my first research
paper.
For those of you that don’t know me well enough, failing at
anything academic was one of my biggest fears in high school. I was on the quest for valedictorian, and plus
failing was just degrading to my pride.
So if just failing in general was a huge deal for me, you
can imagine how bad failing a research paper shook me up.
A lot, if you couldn’t figure that out.
Before I tell the story, there are a few things you should
know:
1)
English and I have never gotten along well to
begin with
2)
I still and always will love my English teacher. She’s a great woman.
3)
Research Papers are a big deal in high school
So, people, let’s begin.
Once upon a time, I was a little Junior in high school
(literally, I’m relatively short). It
was second semester, which meant I was in AP English. All Juniors and Seniors in our school (and I’m
pretty sure the entire state, but don’t quote me on that) are required to write
a research paper.
Each student gets a different topic and has to write a paper
on said topic. Seems easy enough, right?
The way my teacher assigned us our topics was as follows:
1)
She gave us a list of all the topics to choose
from
2)
We all drew a number
3)
Who ever got #1 picked his/her topic first, and
so on and so forth until everyone had picked
4)
That’s what you got
5)
If she was merciful and you got a bad topic because
you were the last to pick, she would let you look at the leftover topics from
the other class and get one of those
I’m pretty sure I drew like #3 or something. I know I was early on. At least I think so. Anyways, that’s irrelevant. I had lots of choices, and I decided on
Alfred Hitchcock and his influences on American movies. Or something like that. It was about Alfred Hitchcock.
I love movies and all, so I knew I would enjoy this. And I did.
I learned a lot from doing this paper.
But anyways, we all got our topics and then started the long
and painstaking process.
1)
Write a thesis statement
2)
Write your thesis statement on a 3 x 5 ruled
index card
3)
Turn in thesis statement
4)
Receive graded thesis statement back
5)
Make an outline
6)
Turn in outline
7)
Receive graded outline back
8)
Find your sources (credible ones, and so many have
to be books, not online stuff)
9)
Print off/ make copies of all of your sources
10)
Make bib cards with 3 x 5 index cards
11)
Give yourself a pep talk
12)
Write a rough draft
13)
Edit rough draft
14)
Highlight the words on your source copies that
you used from every source
15)
Turn in rough draft
16)
Receive graded rough draft back
17)
Edit appropriately
18)
Continue editing until you get so sick of
editing that you can’t look at your paper one more time
19)
Realize you still have to look at your paper
20)
Cry
21)
Check for plagiarism
22)
Check all of your source copies and make sure
they’re highlighted
23)
Staple source copies (each source is stapled separately)
24)
Paper clip bib cards to their corresponding
source copies
25)
Alphabetize source copies
26)
Do any or all of the following: cry, scream,
growl, or throw something
27)
Put everything in your fresh, new clasp envelope
in a very precise order which I cannot remember exactly. Just know that it includes your rubric, ORIGINAL
graded thesis statement and outline, final draft of your paper, alphabetized source
copies that you used, alphabetized source copies that you have but didn’t use,
and probably something else (your birth certificate and social security card
perhaps?).
28)
Write your name, class name, teacher name, and
the date the paper is due in sharpie on the front of your clasp envelope
29)
Go to school on the day the paper is due
30)
Walk around the school with this look of
paranoia in your eyes
31)
Go almost immediately to your English’s teacher’s
room because the paper is due before the tardy bell rings for 1st
block, regardless of when you have English
32)
Take a huge breath
33)
Double and triple check your envelope to make
sure you have everything
34)
Take another huge breath
35)
Put your envelope in the basket
36)
Wait for your paper to be graded
At least that was the process I followed. My teacher has this whole thing down to a
science. A scary, intimidating, stressful
science.
The thing about research papers, however, is that they have
lots of different rules that apply to them.
All I had ever written up to that point was essays, and they’re all my
thoughts and words, so there’s not the whole plagiarism thing to worry about.
But with research papers, you have to cite everything. And I mean everything. You can’t mention anything that another
person said without acknowledging that that person said that. It makes sense, I suppose, but it’s such a
difficult process.
There are three ways to avoid plagiarism:
1)
Paraphrasing
2)
Summarizing
3)
Quoting
Paraphrasing means saying what the source said but in
different words. The definition we learn
in elementary and middle school is, “saying something in your own words,” but
really it’s just saying it in words that the original author did not use.
For instance, pretend I said, “Morgan likes to ride her bike
on days with nice summer weather,” you could paraphrase it like this, “When the
summer weather is pleasant, Morgan enjoys riding her bike.”
I’ve neither really ever understood exactly what summarizing
is nor can I give you an example of it, so just get over yourself.
Quoting means you take exactly what the source says and put
it in your paper, except you have to put quotation marks around it to show that
it isn’t your words. The thing about it,
though, is that only a certain percentage of my paper could consist of directly
quoted words.
The annoying thing is, though, that some words are not
easily paraphrased. For instance, in my
bike example, I used both the words “summer,” “weather,” and “bike” in my
paraphrased sentence. Because those
words were in the original source, I have to put quotation marks around them. So in my paper, the sentence would look like
this:
When the “summer weather” is pleasant, Morgan enjoys riding
her “bike.”
It looks weird when you’re first doing it, but you get used
to it.
Oh, and proper nouns don’t have to be quoted. There really isn’t a way to paraphrase my
name. I mean, you could say “the most
awesome girl you’ll ever know,” or “a super cool person,” but that’s not really
appropriate I’m sure my English teacher would say.
And then, as if that’s not enough, after every time you
mention a source, you have to cite where exactly it came from. These things are called internal
citations. Say my bike sentence came
from page 34 of the book One Cool Person
by John Doe. In the paper, the
sentence would now look like this:
When the “summer weather” is pleasant, Morgan enjoys riding
her “bike” (Doe 34).
It’s important to remember that punctuation marks always go
after the parentheses, unless they’re quotation marks as in this case (this
includes commas).
And then of course you have to list all of your sources in
alphabetical order in the proper MLA format on your works cited page. Don’t get me started on MLA format and works
cited pages. We’ll be here all day.
Overall, writing a research paper is a long, painstaking
process when you’re trying to do it correctly, which was my goal.
To make things worse, there are certain mistakes that will
result in an automatic 50 or 0, depending on the mistake. Plagiarism? Automatic 0.
No internal citations? Automatic
0. No bib cards? Automatic 50.
More than a certain percentage of your paper is quoted? Automatic 50.
There’s more automatic reductions, and they’re all scary
things.
So where, you ask, did I go wrong?
First I’m going to take you through the day when we got back
our graded papers.
It was Friday, April 13th, 2012. My teacher has this mean sense of humor and
purposely gave them back on Friday the 13th.
She waited until the end of class to give us back our papers
so that we wouldn’t have to sit through the whole class period and be a pain to
deal with. So there were about 30ish
minutes before the bell would ring when she started handing them back.
We were all sitting in our desks, and she pulled out the
dreaded basket, filled with envelopes.
Oh, how my heart was pounding.
She went around passing them out, and one by one we looked
at our grades. I will say, my teacher
was very considerate for this reason: she graded the paper and all and wrote
the grade on the rubric, but she also wrote our final grade right under the
flap of the envelope so all we would have to do was look at that. If we couldn’t muster the strength to look at
our paper, we didn’t have to.
She kept handing out more papers and my heart kept beating
faster. I had checked my paper so many
times for plagiarism, I had counted every word and calculated how much was
quoted material. I had checked and
checked and checked.
My best friends got theirs back. All A’s.
That made me happy. I didn’t want
them to fail. They didn’t deserve
it. No one did, really.
And then she laid my envelope on my desk.
There it sat.
There was my name, the class name, my teacher’s name, and
the due date, staring up at me.
This was it.
I picked up the envelope and turned it over.
I took a deep breath and looked under the flap.
50.
My heart immediately sank.
I sat there for a second in disbelief, staring at the 50, absorbed
in my own world, a world where the only thing that existed was that envelope
and that number.
And then I laid down my head and cried.
My teacher had said during the whole process that the ones
that fail are always the ones that you least expect to do so. The girl that would most likely be the
valedictorian? Most people, including
myself, assumed I would do it correctly.
I only let myself cry for a few minutes. I had to be strong, I kept telling
myself. I sat up and wiped away my tears
and gathered the strength to take out my paper and find out what I had done
wrong.
That’s the worst part.
Remember those internal citations I mentioned? They must include both a word and a page
number. Somewhere among all my editing I
accidentally erased one of the page numbers in one citation.
One number cost me 50 points.
I about kicked myself.
The whole time all this was going on, I could feel my best
friends watching me, making glances in my direction to see how I was taking it.
And it was for them that I took my 50 with dignity.
My teacher has this option in place for anyone that scores
lower than a 70. You can get a brand new
topic and write a brand new paper within a space of about two-three weeks for a
chance to score at best an 80. It really
is a generous offer.
She had the paper we had to sign that had all the second-chance
topics on it at the front of the room for us to grab. Many people waited until glass was over to
get one, but I got up from my desk, in front of everyone, and walked to the
front of the room to get me a sheet.
Everyone knew I had failed.
I took my paper to my teacher and asked her to further
explain where I had gone wrong and asked questions about the second-chance
paper. I was still in the aftermath of
crying with the sniffling and all, but I was being strong. She was so nice and patient with me, and I
didn’t get mad at her, just myself. I
knew giving me a 50 had to be as hard on her as it was on me. I’ve known her since I was five, so no big
deal. It’s just giving your daughter’s
best friend a 50 on one of the biggest assignments of her Junior year.
And then I walked to my backpack, pulled out a bag of M
& M’s, and walked over to where my best friends were sitting and talking
and started to join the conversation. Of
course I could just feel the awkward tension, them being shocked at how well I
was taking this whole failure thing. We
all talked, I smiled and laughed, and I ate my M & M’s.
Class ended and we all walked to our next class, which we
had together.
Two girls who had failed checked out and went home. A lot of the ones who failed sat like zombies
in the next class, just still in shock really.
I smiled and laughed and talked to my best friend and stayed
happy. “This girl is handling her 50
like a pro!” she said. I was so proud of
myself.
Throughout the day, when I would see someone I knew, I would
look at them and say, “I failed my research paper!” with a smile on my
face. I confused so many people. It was so much fun!
My friends later told me just how happy they were about how
I handled my 50 and the entire day.
Based on past experiences, they had every reason to believe that I would
act chronically depressed and just be a pain to deal with the rest of the
day. But I didn’t want to put them
through that. They had made A’s, and
they deserved to be happy, and I wasn’t about to ruin their great day. Sure, I went home that night and cried my
eyes out in the shower, but wouldn’t we all?
I’ll admit, writing that second paper was such a
struggle. It was so hard to make myself
go through the entire process again. I
cried more over that paper than the first one.
But you know what? I
got a 79 out of 80, and even after all of that, I still tied for the highest
average in the class.
So what did I learn?
Research papers are dumb? Eh, I
would argue that, but I did learn some other valuable lessons.
1)
The valedictorian isn’t immune to failure
2)
Sometimes your friends’ happiness is more
important than your pity party
3)
Numbers are very important
4)
I don’t care to ever write another paper about
Alfred Hitchcock or Hot Springs National Park (the topic of my second-chance
paper)
This past spring I had to write my Senior research paper. My binder with all my sources and drafts in
it read on the front, “Third Time’s a Charm.”
I really just didn’t want to fail.
I checked that thing about 100 times to make sure every internal citation
had both a word and a number. Those stupid
little numbers. I checked everything religiously. On the day I had to turn it in, I, along with
the others who had failed the previous year, was so paranoid.
I got a 100.
Take that research papers.
I beat you. At least that’s what
we’re going to say.
“Thank you for failing me on my first research paper,” I
said to my teacher during my valedictorian speech. I had embraced it. It has made for a good story.
At some point in your life, you're going to fail
miserably. Are you going to pout, or are
you going to pick yourself up, smile, and eat your M & M’s?
Mo
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