For this particular paper, I did my profile on Eleanor Roosevelt. However, it was not until several hours of deciding that I finally decided to choose her. At first, I was planning on doing my profile on Julius Caesar, but I couldn’t think of why he would be relevant to me and why I felt impacted to him. In the beginning, I thought that Julius Caesar would be a good topic because his death fell on my birthday, which is the Ides of March, an auspicious date to be aware of. I did not feel much of an emotional or sentimental connection to him besides that fact that his death coincides with my birthday. Finally, when Eleanor Roosevelt was chosen, I felt that could tie my personal feelings about her and why she fascinates me.
Since Eleanor was already dead, it was impossible for me to interview her, so I did some random database searches via the web and through the library databases. I came across an article about her marriage from the Gale Cengage database, and in it, a particular line that stood out to me was that it was unclear why Eleanor got married to FDR in the first place. Just like any typical couple, they meet through family since they were distantly related cousins and later on at parties, but it was still unclear where to the spark of love occurred in any of those gatherings. Then when I went to look up articles surrounding her marriage to FDR, there were several articles that included some inkling that the Eleanor and FDR did not have a good marriage, which lead me to choose the first lady and her unhappy marriage.
The thing that I found quite interesting about her is that even though she had cheated multiple times in her marriage, she is still revered as a leader in history, which is contradictory to the reaction that people have today with exposing secrets. Nowadays, people are after one another, young and old, about bad pasts and secretive actions. It’s as if one was walking on an neverending bed of nails; one wrong move and it can not only injure you but impact the rest of your life. As a I was writing my profile, I kept thinking that if people could look past Eleanor Roosevelt’s faults, then they should surely be able to look past other people’s faults today.
Since Eleanor’s marriage was not widely discussed, it was difficult to find articles about her marriage. When I tried looking onto Gale Cengage database, I did not see much on her marriage, but more on her contributions in politics and community service. Moreover, when I was looking through google for recent articles of an analysis of her personal life, I got many articles on the affairs her husband had during their forty year marriage. There were many interesting tidbits from these articles. However, it was more difficult to find something that was not published too long ago and came from a reputable source. For instance, I was going to use an article about one of the affairs that Eleanor had, which was titled “EXCLUSIVE: How prim and proper First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt fell in love with a 200-pound WOMAN reporter who drank like a fish, played a mean game of poker, smoked cigars and swore a blue streak.” At first, I was going to include evidence from this article into my profile because it included actual photographs of Eleanor and her lover, Lorena Hickok. As much as it may have appeared to be credible, it was not. First off, the title of the article did give me hints that it was going to be biased, and when I looked up how reputable DailyMail.co.uk, the website name, was I came across reviews from other websites that mostly said that it publishes many articles that have skewed biases on the topic it discusses. DailyMail.co.uk is like one of those websites that includes articles about rumored things that one would see in online advertisements from pop up ads.
Other parts with the writing process that I struggled with was trying to think of the topic, and I think that it would have been easier if I had written down a list of questions to like we did in class with trying to find out which particular angle we would want our final research paper to be on. Writing down those questions would definitely have saved me a lot of time, because it only took ten minutes to come up with what I wanted to answer, which would give me a direction in terms of how I would answer it. Another process to mention was how I was going to organize the sources that I was going to use. I think that I definitely spent too much time figuring out which sources to use during my first draft, and I did not spend enough time finishing the rough draft instead. I was afraid that I was going to get mixed up with which sources I had used in each paragraph.
When I went back to proofread, I read my paper once, and then I reread my sources again to make sure that the evidence that I did pull from them was actually from those articles and that it was making sense. Afterwards, I reread my paper several times again to make sure that I was providing enough background information so that the reader could understand my point and what I was conveying. One of key step that would have made my research process more organized and smoother is if I had printed out the sources that I was going to use so that I could annotate and highlight the specific parts that I needed. By highlighting which parts of the source I would need, I could then be able to put them into my outline so that I can first write out everything before going back to edit.
