Lesson 29.3 - academic articles and essays

For this weeks lesson we were supposed to find an article connected to a subject we wanted to write an essay about. I also finished the night before an essay about last weeks Prezi-presentation, which I were supposed to write due to an earlier lesson I missed.

It feels a bit exciting to write an essay about a subject connected to our studies. We can choose anything in our field and write about it in English, which I'm not all used to. The essay isn't that long, so I don't need to worry too much about it. That is why the length is an influence on my eagerness, too.

However, I must confess: I had some difficulties finding the article. I wasn't sure how I would get it to Moodle, since all of my articles I got from my courses was in paper-form. I decided to use Nelli (http://www.nelliportaali.fi/V). In my studies I have somewhat become familiar with Nelli, although all results don't have a link to the whole article. I started with searching for a subject about nordic literature, but I didn't find that much in English. So I decided to look through different writers and books I knew about and that I knew were researched. I tried searching words and names like "Ian McEwan", "Camus", "The Outsider", "Jane Eyre", "Stieg Larsson", "popular literature" and so on. At last I tried with Dracula and found some good articles.

During the lesson we started preparing for our essays by reading through the articles we chose. I found out that my article was actually a book review and way too short for any use. I immediately started looking for a new article on Nelli and found one I'm really happy with: "The Narrative Method of Dracula" by David Seed. It is a 14 pages long article which I'll use writing my essay. I don't feel at all nervous about the essay, I feel it is going to be useful to write an real essay in English about my own subject. Reading the article was not that hard, there were some words I didn't recognize but I don't except myself to understand every single word of an academic article.

It was nice to prepare for the essay during the lesson, I found myself concentrating much better than home. Afterwards it feels easier to continue with the draft and the real essay. For next lesson, after the Easter holiday, we are supposed to be ready with our draft for the essay and we will have some group discussions. I am one of the discussion leaders, and hopefully I will get some inspiration for a topic everyone in the group will be interested in. I have never been a discussion leader to a small group, so I am both excited and nervous.