The story of my nonsense paper

I got the idea for my paper while thinking about how to decorate my unborn daughter's nursery. That lead to a little research on the classic Winnie-the-Pooh stories which lead to some unpleasant comments on Good Reads that prompted me to defend such a fantastic piece of literature. You can read more on that here.

I started with a few different thesis statements to get the ball rolling. I came up with these after a close reading of Winnie-the-Pooh to determine what all the stories had in common and how I could implement that into a paper. I thought the biggest thing was the grammatical errors. That also seemed to be what people were complaining about in their Good Reads comments.

I got some great feedback on my thesis statements. The comment from my sister even lead me to what I thought would be my thesis. However as I continued to research, I realized there was more to the grammatical errors thing than originally met the eye. A second look at the Good Reads comments introduced me to the genre of Nonsense Literature.

Once I researched the genre a little more, I found that what I thought were grammatical errors were actually forms of implementing nonsense into the story. And from there, my new thesis was born. I was even able to compile all the quotes I thought were grammatical errors but turned out to be related to the genre. It was so helpful to do this, because I could see all the elements of the book I wanted to reference in my paper.

Then before I could begin writing the paper, I had to make an outline! I am HUGE fan of the outline. If I do enough research there, I've done nearly all the work of writing the paper. All I have to do is turn my half baked thoughts into complete sentences and BAM! I'm done. However once I started writing the paper and came up with a rough draft, I realized that my outline was a litte too detailed because I had too much information. It would have been great for a 10 page paper but for my 6 page paper, some stuff had to go.

After some serious re-working which included cutting and combining paragraphs, I came up with my final rough draft. But it was still rough which meant I still had some editing to do. I posted the draft in a google document and was able to edit it with guidance from my mom over the phone. It was cool because she could offer suggestions and then watch me make the changes from her computer in Georgia.

Once I was happy with how it looked, I created an after outline. This gave me a second look at the flow of my paper. It was interesting to see how the before and after outline had changed. Then in class, I classmate peer reviewed my paper and thankfully only had one big thing that confused him that I needed to fix. And what I came up with is a finished product, which I am happy to say is finished several days before it's due.

Now that's one of the best feelings ever!