Reflection on Outside Reading Project

So for this week I guess we're supposed to give our thoughts on the paper that we've been working on for the last couple of months.  Overall, I have mixed feelings towards it.  In the end, I think that I did submit a pretty decent paper (at least by my standards).  It definitely helped that we turned in our work multiple times to get feedback from Ms. Marcy.  Each time I got something back, I knew exactly what to do in order to make the paper better.  Also, I think that the levels of generality format may have helped me organize my examples.  Initially, I was planning on actually writing out a paper and was surprised that we were only going to have to create an outline of sorts for our finished product.  However, this turned out to be more difficult that I anticipated since I had to go back and find support and evidence for many of my major points.  It also helped that we were made to organize our paper by ideas, since in the past I've rarely organized my papers in that fashion.  

I think that the main improvement that could be made to this paper is that it seems like it was spread out over too  long of a period of time.  Each time we got something back, it would be so long until the next due date that I would lose my train of thought.  As the months passed, it kind of faded into the background and wasn't really a primary assignment anymore.  I liked how we had a lot of time to re-read the book, but I think everything else could be condensed a bit.  I know that this was already mentioned in class, but I think that it would have been more helpful if the thesis was finalized before we started looking at literary criticisms.  I felt like I was just reading blindly, and I wasn't even sure which criticisms I could use until after I finished my thesis.  Then I ended up having to go back and find another criticism because the ones I had previously found weren't enough to support my thesis.  As a result, I feel like the criticisms didn't play as important of a role in my paper as I had hoped.  Also, I'm not sure how much re-reading the book helped out in writing the paper.  I know I did pick up on some things that I hadn't noticed previously, but I think that I would've been able to write a paper of about the same quality after only reading the book once.  Maybe the students should be allowed to choose a book that they haven't read before.  In all, the assignment was helpful in showing me various things and I think that overall it was beneficial and a good use of our time.