Some topics that I have in mind to research and write about for my Research-Driven Writing Project are “The intersectionality of gendered racism and psychological distress among African American women in the 21^st century” and “The conceptualization of passive racism in American society and its psychological impact on African American men”. There is a problem in the world with their issues with black people. They are oppressed for no reason. Just because the color of their skin is different, doesn’t make them any different, and many people treat African Americans very harsh. They do no deserve to be treated so badly.

I know how much Racism harms African Americans and I know how much they endure with all the troubles that white people give them. This has made me wonder if it affects them in any possible way, and by that I mean mentally/psychologically. I went online and started seeing if there is any connection between racism and psychological issues.  I found on many website and different sources that racism does in fact cause psychological impacts on African Americans.

After evaluating my Literacy Narrative and Rhetorical Analysis, a few topics came to mind.

My narrative wasn’t well-organized but I did have a theme of social media and the positive and negative influences that it has with spreading information.  COVID-19 is a new virus, so it’s not as extensively studied like influenza for example.  Thus, anyone affected by it would be interested in knowing about health risks and ways of transmission.  I first thought of Twitter, because many journalists have been using it as a medium to report on current in-the-moment news.  Twitter is also useful for researchers because they can collect data on hashtags and other quantitative metrics.  A quick search led me to studies about trending hashtags related to COVID-19 and some research articles about how to define and measure disinformation.  A supplement would be to also examine other studies measuring disinformation in other contexts.  Most similar, would be the potential Ebola pandemic around 6 years ago.  It would be an ambitious and relevant topic to everyone here, so I’m leaning towards picking it.

My rhetorical analysis was very specifically about one song’s lyrics, which is mainly about living with ADHD.  My thesis however, believes that the song is also about how environmental factors contribute to the development and severity of ADHD.  So there are a couple of topics I could research here.  One would be about childhood trauma and ADHD, which is extensively studied in psychology.  Another could be about drug addiction and boredom, which is covered in the song lyrics and is also widely studied.  That topic would be good if I wanted to look at something that doesn’t have a clear answer.

1. Research if there is any type of correlation between school funding and standardized test scores in the US and, if there is, the possible implications of it.
2. Research if bilingual and/ or multilingual persons tend to learn subjects with more ease than the average monolingual person. (possibly restricted to academic settings)
3. Research whether being bilingual or multilingual has any type of correlation to employment and career advancement. 

For my research topics, I have chosen subjects that have intrigued me in the past. I’ve always wondered if kids whose school has higher funding achieve better scores in standardized tests such as the SAT. I assume the answer is probably yes, but it would be interesting to find any data backing this up. Another topic I have wondered about is whether or not people who know more than one language encounter minor difficulty in learning something new when compared to other’s who speak only one language. I was also planning to see if there is any IQ related information on it but it is probably not appropriate. I’ve heard different arguments on this topic and it would be interesting to see the conclusions of some actual studies. Related to the prior topic I also wanted to look into the job aspects of multilingual/bilingual vs. monolingual, taking different factors into account, the results could go either way and I find that interesting. Anyways, I think that the research topic I will pursue is #2 since the psychology and physiology aspect of it calls my attention. 

After re-reading my literacy narrative I noticed that I have less of a hard time writing when I write about something that  I can relate to. Something that interests me that I don’t necessarily know a lot about is Black  American History. Because black history is my history I figured research on a topic like this would make this project fun for me. Two ideas I had were researching the lifestyle and people of Seneca Village and looking at the time of the War on Drugs and how it affected black people (and even more specifically black people in New York). From my initial ideas I’m leaning towards researching the War on Drugs. I want to look at how that affected incarceration rates of black people and the policing of black neighborhoods. I also want to research how drug addiction was treated back then and how it is treated now. I am still pretty much figuring out the specific question I’m trying to answer or the topic within this that I want to research but I do know that this is a direction I want to go in. I think that my paper will be very chronological. Basically I will start off with the War on Drugs and then how that one event led to other things over time. I would probably be looking into a lot of documentaries and statistics in order to do this paper. There are some speeches from the president I could watch and old television ads about drugs. Overall I think I have a research worthy topic that could get me a lot of information and show signs of correlation to even the present day. 

When thinking about the research driven project I knew I wanted to write about the Hebrew language. The problem is that this breaks down into many different topics. For example, I can write about how Hebrew unites Jews around the world no matter where they live or who they are. Another idea I had was, how it is one of the oldest languages being used in a modern country, and can research why. The more I thought about Hebrew as a language the more topics I thought of. Finally, I decided that I can write about how cultures and communities helped keep the Hebrew language alive over many years. In this topic I will research different communities that spoke Hebrew. Additionally, I will elaborate on how they passed it on through their children, customs, and books- ensuring the language never died. I can also talk about how sometimes keeping your cultures-language and everyday-language separate can be beneficial. In order to find sources, I will search different key words in school databases and on specific sites on google. Hopefully I will come out with a bunch of good ones. However, I am concerned that many sources I will try to research might have some bias. In order to watch out for this I will have to look into the authors of all my sources. Some goals I hope to accomplish by doing this research assignment would be to have a greater understanding about how the Hebrew language stayed alive through community. In doing so, I will then appreciate it more when it is spoken in my own house and culture.

I will be basing my research on the analysis of a book, film, TV show, etc. Seeing as I wrote my entire Rhetorical Analysis based on the latest James Bond film Spectre, my Research-Driven Writing Project will be a continuation of that assignment in a sense. In my research analysis of the film, I will be re-analyzing the said film and looking for hidden meanings/ key ideas throughout. Colors, imagery, diction, people, etc. will play an important role in understanding how and why the film was created in the way that it was; will help me in my analysis of the film itself. Certain scenes in the movie make the audience feel different emotions and the backstories of certain individuals do the same as well. I will use this information in my analysis of the film and will keep an eye out for how each scene makes me feel as an audience member. I will research the backstories of certain main characters and try to understand the purpose of this addition to the James Bond series. The James Bond franchise plays on the emotions of the audience and captivates said emotions, leaving the audience members on the edge of their seats throughout each movie’s entirety. There was a reason for the creation of this installment of the franchise, Spectre, and I will try to re-analyze what was analyzed previously in past assignments. By re-analyzing the film, I will be able to come up with some secondary research to help build my overall claim about the film.

After reading over both my Rhetorical Analysis and my first Literacy Narrative, I came upon some thoughts that I would like to know more about. The first question I thought of was: do children benefit more from attending regular public school or being homeschooled? Could be an interesting subject to look more into since I had such a different experience from being at school and being at home. I also know many kids that prefer being homeschooled, so I would like to know what are both the pros and cons and compare. I did not stay in touch with these kids, so when doing research I could look at different opinions from kids who have experienced homeschooling and why the do or do not like it. I also have access to the internet where I could find many articles based on the topic. Another thought that crossed my mind was whether or not people who speak multiple languages benefit in our present employment market? Growing up bilingual, I felt like I had to work much harder than those who only spoke English. Keeping up with two languages at a young age, or in general, is not an easy task. In our country today, there are people from all over the world who speak all kinds of languages. This topic could be both fun and interesting to look into because I am bilingual and I want to see if learning a new language could also benefit a person’s career. 

How has the coronavirus affected the US economy from March until now?

My plan for college is to major in finance and minor in economics. I have always had an interest in the stock market and the economy. In fact, I just started investing in the stock market recently! There would be tons of articles that I would be able to use for this kind of research.  I think my goal would be to incorporate some fundamental ideas of economics and then to show how the coronavirus would apply to that. This is the topic that I’m leaning towards because it’s already something that really interests me and I think doing research on it would be beneficial to my overall education.

What foods are easy to make and healthy that I like?

I’m a terrible cook. The only thing I know how to make is ramen, eggs, and oatmeal. This research topic could be very beneficial to me because I would probably eat more food, the food would be stuff that I like and that’s good for me, and I would be better in the kitchen. This is still only my second choice because I’m not really sure if this is something that I would want to write about. It kind of just seems like something I should research and then just try. With my other idea about the coronavirus and economics, I feel like I would be able to go more in-depth. I’m trying to image the writing for the food research question: “The first recipe I found was spaghetti. To make it, you will need… First, you… The next step is… Finally, you… And then you have made spaghetti!” While this is an option I think the economic question would be the better choice

After reading my Literacy Narrative and Rhetorical Analysis, I’ve come up with three ideas that I might want to pursue for my research assignment.

First, gathering from my Literacy Narrative, I feel that I have great interest towards Chinese literature, particularly the well-known phrases that have been passed down from dynasties ago. I believe that these phrases lasted this long for a reason, and that it could be interesting and educating to dive deeper to their roots and their applications over the years. 

Regarding Chinese literature, I’m also interested in well-known texts. One famous work that I have on top of my mind is The Art of War by Sun Tzu. It’s not a particularly long text. It’s a few dozen pages long, and each page contains one or two essential sentences, like morals, intended to teach rulers and generals. I love this work because I’m a big fan of military strategy and used to read and watch TV shows that take place in warring periods. I can probably pull out a few pages from this book to serve as the basis of my research.

The second topic that I have interest in is success in America. It is a very broad topic, but hopefully I can narrow it down much more, if that is going to be the topic I’ll analyze. I’m thinking about considering success in certain fields, which can be broken down into careers as well as social settings (rural, suburban, urban). However, coming up with a claim or thesis might be difficult for this one.

The last topic arose after rereading my Rhetorical analysis, which was about the Apple’s 1984 ad. Having previously read the Steve Jobs biography, I’m interested in looking into the company on a deeper level. For this one, I’m thinking about researching Apple’s ads over the years and maybe find a common characteristic that I can base my thesis off of, or I can research a particular product and discuss their influence in a particular segment of society.

For my Research Driven Writing Project Proposal, I have thought about two ideas that I am interested in. The first being how has the Spanish language progressed in my community and what is the current state of the language. Another topic that also stood out to me was how badly technology has harmed the youth and what kind of mental damage it will continue to do. The paper would likely also be broken down into an introduction that would deal with many of the claims I would present and some data to back it up. The next couple of paragraphs would be full of sources and information that can strengthen the question that is presented. The conclusion would recap all the claims and the evidence and allow the reader to see how detrimental technology can be at times. So at least for this paper, I really want to look at studies that involve the youth and even some adults and see how someone with minimal access to technology compares to someone with free access. I think it would be quite interesting to see the differences in personality and just information that these two individuals would have. I would also like to compare studies in the 90s and early 2000s to see how the youth at that time would carry themselves to compare them to the children of today who have been blessed with all kinds of technology that is taken for granted. The majority of the sources that I will likely be using will be from Psychologists and Clinicians who have to deal with these types of people and have accurate information with substantial data that can back up any claims that I may present in my paper. My research question would likely ask if the damage that has been done is permanent or could there be a way that the youth is no longer as dependent on technology on a daily basis.