This, Too, Is Research

Goldthwaite talks about using research for inspiration. I think it is actually really neat how she does this. She says when she is creating a new character, a lot of times she has trouble naming them. Names of characters play a very important role in how they are perceived and how they develop. She says she will use a phone book to look for good names that can fit with her character’s description. In doing so, her research is inspiring her to create new information about these characters. She will ask questions about how the character looks physically, how they are emotionally, and how other characters react to the created character to help pick the name. In Research for learning she talks about how often times new research can keep the paper interesting to the writer as well as the reader. She uses the example of a writer, Kristina Emick, is talking about hangnails in her essay. It seems like a trivial and unexciting thing to research; however even the tiniest thing like a hangnail has a lot of research on it. She says it stayed interesting because she kept finding out new things. Like how to treat them, whether or not they had been in the news recently, and how they commonly occur. She says it was actually really interesting to learn and, in turn, made her paper more interesting. I used research for inspiration the most in my last genre. The more I looked back at the scores and the statistics of the games on the field in my personal narrative the more I remembered and was inspired to write. An example of research I did for my genres was I was having trouble with Imovie while creating my video. This required me to look up a lot of things about Imovie to help get me through it and I actually learned a lot.