Literature Review Reflection

Researching a topic for the literature review assignment was rather easy. I must say that I found it easier for me to come up with topic ideas this time around. Initially, I had several ideas for topics running through my head; however, as I focused more on my personal interests and experiences I quickly decided on a topic. A few days after the assignment was handed to me, I was up late completing an assignment for another class when my asthma started to bother me. My asthma symptoms are usually triggered by stress, allergies and extreme temperature conditions. Immediately as I felt my symptoms worsening, I quickly made myself a cup of coffee and took a spray. That is when it hit me. I decided to focus my literature review paper on coffee and its correlation to health. I generally consume coffee when my asthma is exacerbating or need to stay up to complete assignments. It has always helped me to relieve my asthma symptoms; nevertheless, on the other hand it always gave me extreme nervousness after consuming a large cup. My doctor informed that coffee was a natural bronchodilator; however, I was curious to know what other effects it had on my body or general health. This led me to choosing the topic “Habitual Coffee Consumption Correlation to Health” for my literature review paper.

I found researching this topic extremely interesting and easy; moreover, the research results were conflicting, opposing and inconsistent. I found that several different biases existed and that the effects varied in different individuals. This gave me mixed messages on whether coffee was harmful or beneficial to the body. Based on the information that I read in the supporting research papers, it is evident that a lot more research needs to be done to rule out the facts on coffee’s correlation to health.  I chose certain research papers to include in my paper based on different health issues and benefits associated with habitual coffee drinking. I truly didn’t find this assignment as challenging as the others as I found it easier to find a focus after consulting with the professor.

My experiences with my previous papers made me more prepared to tackle and complete this assignment with ease. I focused more on my stance on coffee consumption without including opinions, but rather facts that I gathered from the research papers. This time I didn’t focus too much on what the research papers said; nonetheless, I focused on synthesizing that information to form a stance. My editing process was different from the scientist profile paper assignment because, I was more concerned about making sure that my paper was consistent with facts that correlated with the topic to form my stance. In the scientist profile assignment, I focused more on the facts about the scientist and really didn’t form a stance nor elaborate on my thoughts about her.

I feel as if I was very successful in addressing the assignment prompt because, I had a better understanding on which perspective to write my paper. I feel as if I grew so much from the first assignment up until now. In the beginning, I found the assignment prompts for almost every assignment to be confusing. In the beginning of class, I always pondered on what exactly it meant to write a paper about a topic without summarizing the information that I collected from research and to form a stance without an opinion. Now I’m confident about rewriting my first two papers to align them with the course objectives and their assignment prompts. I learned a lot from my previous papers which made me a better writer this time for my literature review paper. I approached this assignment way differently from my previous papers.  I’m enthusiastic about what my growth will look like in the next writing assignment.

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