Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Final Paper

My final research paper is about stem cell research. Here it is. Fair warning: it's just over 7 pages long.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

About those essays...

Before I post the link to today's essay, I need to amend a statement from my previous post. In writing about my writing habits, I was perhaps a bit vague. Allow me to provide more detail.
First of all, I don't proofread, period. I know it's a horrible habit, but scribbling a three-page paper an hour or two before it is due doesn't really permit me the luxury of proofreading. Typically, I write the paper straight through with little to no prior planning except for the occaional casual thoughts throughout the week that tend to be something like, "What homework do I have? English. What was that assignment again? Write a compare and contrast essay. What am I going to compare and contrast?" This thought process continues until I have a vague sense of what I'm going to write, and then when it's crunch time, I reflect upon these thoughts and formulate them into some sort of order.
Secondly, I have never considered myself to have excellent grammar, and my writing tends to have mistakes. These mistakes, as well as multiple typographical errors, would normally be caught in the proofreading phase, but if you didn't skip the previous paragraph, you know that I don't have a proofreading phase.

Hopefully this clears a few things up for some of you out there reading my papers, which I have already stated are the uncorrected, raw versions, and slandering my work.
I do have to apologize for uploading the wrong paper for Running vs. Cycling: The Great Divide--when I was renaming the files for uploading I swapped two of them. I uploaded the correct file, overwriting the incorrect one, so the links here and in the "Promise Kept" post are working properly. The file that was incorrectly labeled run_vs_bike.doc is called Dean Karnazes vs. Pamela Reed. Since the first one was supposed to have already been posted and the second one was already posted, here is another one: Imagination, which was meant to define imagination but used by me to tell a story about my niece.

Monday, December 19, 2005

More Essays

Everyone knows that smoking is disgusting and harmful; here is an essay that follows the path of smoke through the body as it kills: Smoking Kills.

Sight is a wondrous sense, and most of us would be completely lost without it. Have you ever wondered exactly how it works? Here's an essay tracing the path of vision from photon to synapse: Understanding Vision.

Before any of you bash my writing, realize that, due to my procastinating ways, most of these papers were done the night before class (or the hour on Saturday between my morning run and class), so the endings were especially rushed.

Please don't feel compelled to read these things unless you are really interested--they are all at least a couple pages long and you don't have to waste your time with it if you don't want to.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Promise Kept

OK, do you remember how I said I would upload the essays I wrote for English and then I never did? Well, it's time to live up to my word. I will post a link on this blog to a paper every day for the next week or so, and you can read it if you so desire. I will not, however, be able to post the corrected versions, partly due to my laziness and partly because some of the "corrections" altered the papers and aren't really my work. So, without further fondu, er... whatever, here is the first installment of my writings: "Running vs. Cycling: The Great Divide".
I think you'll like this one, Bill, and you might even agree (or disagree) so much that you feel obligated to write to me, telling me how right (or wrong) I am and how awesome (or super-cool) I am for writing so much about running and cycling.

Friday, December 16, 2005

No news is good news

All the people (both of you) who have been barraging me with unsolicited requests to increase the frequency of my updates (asked me what the hell is going on) should know that it is not because nothing is happening that I haven't updated in a while--it is because too much is happening. Now that I don't have class every day after work, I have some time to post: Finals Week was kinda rough, but I think I pulled through with a 4.0.

Remember, No news is good news, as they say. Who are "they?" And does that mean that a lack of news is good news or that all news is bad news? It doesn't really matter; what I mean is that I'm fine, just busy is all.