Research Paper Reflection

     Research papers have consistently been my least favorite assignments throughout my time in school. I assumed that it was simply because they were “hard,” and required too much effort to ever be enjoyable. While I’m not going to bullshit you and say that this research paper was a walk in the park, but for the first time I feel like I appreciated the challenge rather than resenting it.
      This is almost certainly related to subject that I chose to write about; having something interesting to research makes it a lot easier to find enjoyment writing a paper and feel engaged while doing so. I originally intended on researching South American Ayahuasca ceremonies and writing about that, but I had trouble finding enough reliable research on the topic. Disappointed, I decided something music related was my next best option, and with rites of passage in mind, punk seemed like a natural choice. I found a lot of very cool information about the various facets of punk culture, but connecting it to rites of passage was surprisingly difficult at first. I took the idea of punk as a personal rite of passage and harped on that for a while, but it felt like there was something bigger that I was missing. Punk as a cultural paradigm shift for the West made sense, but justifying it meant a massive amount of research about every aspect of punk and how to relate that to a broader idea of macro individualism.
     Formulating a thesis from there was the biggest challenge of the paper. I had an idea for what I wanted to say, but wording it was tough. After going through a few drafts, I felt like my thesis needed to be more specific, so I directly related the promotion of individualism to the small details of punk culture, such as specific song lyrics, films, clothing, and dance. This allowed me to focus on small scale ideas for the body of the paper,  which I then related to the larger idea of rites of passage in my conclusion and a little bit at the end of each body paragraph to reinforce the relevancy of my points.
     Reflecting on these ideas was actually very enjoyable; I didn’t know a ton about punk prior to this paper, and the constant reflection on these specific examples gave me a great primer in punk ideology. I managed to stick to my thesis relatively well despite having a few moments of revision within the body of my paper to make sure it related to rites of passage as well as I could. It was difficult taking on such a broad topic, but I think that focusing on a few specific examples was the best way of going about it. I consistently found so much material that I wanted to comment on, and I had to rein in my ideas during the reflection on my research because I could have spent hours and hours going through everything I found.
     The writing of it.. Introductions are always the most difficult point in papers for me, and if I don’t have a good intro I cannot feel comfortable writing the paper. I drafted the first paragraph a few times, but the first few attempts made some generalizations and assertions that I didn’t feel comfortable with, so I found that pairing down what I originally had was my best bet. I wrote from what I already knew about the subject, but tried to back up my claims and assertions with cited evidence from the multitude of sources I consulted. The conclusion was also fairly difficult because that’s where I tie my ideas back to rites of passage, and this crucial point required a lot of thought. I remained as general as I could while trying to use my specific examples from the body to reinforce the idea of punk as cultural rite of passage.
     Overall this was a really awesome assignment. I’m being real with you, too. I enjoyed the process of researching this subject (as much as one can enjoy research as a college freshman, I guess), and while the writing of it was trying and difficult at times, I think I came out a stronger writer for it. I also learned a ton about punk rock while knocking out a Lang 120 assignment, so hell ya about that.