Alex Aguilar

4/26/13

ENC 1102

Paper 2- Process Memo

The Road to the Athlete

By far this was my favorite project of this entire class. After paper one and figuring out

how I needed to think for this class, I really felt comfortable with this paper. After I turned in

paper one, I decided to look at the prompt for paper two right away. When I first read through

the prompt, I was a bit confused on what Joe was asking us to right but after getting some

feedback from a few of my friends, it started to make some sense. Once I realized what this

paper was asking, I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about athletes

but more specifically the “Jock”. I wanted to focus on how the average “Jock” athlete was

portrayed in movies and how these portrayals are changing in modern times. But I also wanted

to show how the older jock portrayals in movies cause a rather harsh stereotype to be placed

on athletes everywhere.

At the beginning of this project, it was relatively easy. The first and second drafts were

pretty easy to create because I had so much that I wanted to say on this topic. So those two

drafts went by in a breeze. However once I came to the 3rd draft, I realized that I had started to

run out of topics to talk about. I started to notice that I became to repeat myself on many of

the aspects of this paper. Luckily I had a conference with Joe that week so I was really able to

bounce my ideas off of him. About mid-way through the conference I hear Joe say the words

“research paper”. This was my light bulb moment. I had completely forgotten that this paper

was meant to be a research paper. Up until this point I was treating it as any other run of the

mill English paper. So that night I decided to go home and completely reconstruct my paper. I

did not start from scratch because I felt that much of the paper still pertained to the topic.

Rather I looked for places where I started to become a bit redundant and decided to edit them.

After about two hours of research I had a small pile of websites that would help support my

argument in my paper. So I went back to work adding, editing and revising text in my paper.

After about 3 days of slowly writing my paper, I had finished and I felt extremely proud

about my paper and what I had created. So the next day I turned in my paper to Joe with my

head held high. The next week, Joe handed me back my paper and I was pleased to see that

there was not too many revisions that were needed for my paper. In Joe’s end summary of my

paper he said that I had a very strong paper however he felt that I was lacking a bit of evidence

to support all of my claims. I re-read my paper and found this to be true. Being a so called

“Jock” in high school, I used a lot of personal references and personal experiences in my paper.

So for the final draft I decided to find some more evidence. I looked up more examples of

typical “Jocks” such as the jock character in “Not Another Teen Movie” and I was even able to

justify that the character Fred from Scooby-Doo was also portrayed as a Jock. This led me to

write almost an extra 300 words onto my paper. After fixing a few more details placed on my

paper, I felt like I was finished. So I put my resources in MLA form and made sure my entire

paper was in MLA formatting and I finished.