DISCLAIMER: I wrote this blog post over a week ago but never typed it up, that is why my blog posts that seem to be written right after another are actually about my research paper over time.

I have found my brain running loose with this new kind of writing. In high school, we used specific outlines to get only specific wheels turning while stopping others. This class is like greasing up those wheels with some WD-40 and letting them run and run and run and run and spew out information and the new job is trying to get it all down on paper in a way that makes sense.

But this seems to be my biggest struggle. I have thrown out and rewritten my research paper so many times it's ridiculous. Why am I doing this? Because I keep on letting the wheels spin and the paper begins to go out of control. Having never written a research paper, I don't even have a funnel for those to go into.

This, I believe, is the function of those structures we all write again and again in high school. These annoying formulas are the funnels we use so that when we get to this class, we can let the wheels spin but also funnel out what we need.

I have decided to literally write out an outline, make my essay structured but also randomly let the wheels spin a little. I need to call back my internal critic that I let go of at the beginning of the year and find a little structure for these crazy wheels in my head.