The Academic Paper of Awesomeness

The day of reckoning draws dearer, our papers are due tonight! I guess I could've posted about my progress earlier in the week, but as I'm sure we can all attest to, this week has been insane!! Either way I would very much appreciate your input, even at the eleventh hour.

As I'm sure some of you may have already inferred by my comments about it in class, (and I apologize if they've gotten annoying, I just really like this topic) my academic paper is about the political ramifications of applying print to legal texts.

 Here's my intro paragraph:

"The American Revolution, the English Civil War, and the French and Russian Revolutions, all are examples of unprecedented political and social change that occurred after a particularly pivotal event in history – then invention of the printing press. The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history. This primarily brought about a change in the way people communicated legal knowledge, and thereby how they communicated their ideas on the subject. There are two main results of printed law that directly caused this change: greater public access to uniform legal decisions and court proceedings, and a more public discourse regarding law and its functions leading to the wide dissemination of political ideas. While some may argue that the transition from spoken to written law or some other turning point in history was more groundbreaking in its nature, it’s quite apparent that the transition from oral and written legal traditions to the printed word had an effect with far greater scope than those of other developments."


In case you didn't catch it, my thesis is, "The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history." I think it's simple, provocative, and gets my point across. 

What are your thoughts? Did this really lead to more political change than ANY other single event in history? The only one I could think of was possibly The American Revolution, which I believe depended a lot on print knowledge in the first place. I think it's a pretty divisive statement, so I'm sure there will be someone who disagrees with me. Thanks in advance for your input!

A Different Path..

So when I was typing up the paper, I realized that I wanted to take the paper in a different direction. So I revamped my  thesis and intro paragraph.

Here it is:

          Since the start of elementary school, many students remember the multiple practice sheets taken home to repeatedly copy the same word over and over again to remember not only how to write the words but how to spell them. Orthography is the study devoted and concerned with letters and spelling of a language. Learning to read, while it may seem absurd to think it is especially difficult since the frustration once experienced took place, for the majority of the population, when they were very young. The acquisition of spelling is vital to orthographic knowledge that is gained while learning to read. Literacy is affected by the orthographic knowledge acquired because without learning how to spell correctly, word identification and comprehension become issues. Orthography has impacted general education in respects to literacy greatly and has affected how people gain the knowledge skills required to be able to read.

The Paper

*Before I begin this blog post of the process to writing this paper, I would just like to ask if you could please bear with me if this post is not the greatest or a little scattered. Due to some personal problems I'm currently a bit compromised and unfocused. Through time I know I can get out of this rut but I just need that time first.*

For the academic paper, I considered how I would like to approach this. I considered just finding the big picture from all the books I found regarding orthography and the effect it had on print. But I realized I wouldn't have too much time to look through all the books again.
I then decided I would pick one learning outcome and emphasize that using orthography and print.
After looking over the learning outcomes list, I realized that there was something in each of the outcomes I could address and use and emphasize.

I figured out then how I could instead use 3 of the outcomes, the ones I had trouble narrowing down with, and use them to emphasize orthography and print, how each applies to the learning outcome.
The 3 outcomes I'm using are:

• Communicating Knowledge
• Knowledge Skills
• Sharing Knowledge

I feel like spelling has a big impact on all of these.

I figured the bulk (body) of my paper would be devoted to them.

As for my thesis:

"Orthography has impacted general education greatly, especially since the introduction of print, and has effected how knowledge is communicated, gained, and shared."

I feel like it is a simple thesis, but straightforward. I never liked making an obscure thesis statement like my AP Lit teacher tried teaching me how to do. I feel the most straightforward thesis is what gets the point across.

What do you think?