Writing as a researcher is a main area of writing I have developed over my four years at Elon. Research projects began my first year in my honors classes, and became progressively more in-depth as the semesters changed. This section demonstrates some of the diverse topics I have researched for projects and papers in various classes.

As an Honors Fellow, research was a part of my academic life from my first class at Elon. Our Honors courses were designed to prepare us for the ultimate research project – the two-year thesis. The first document listed here represents one of the longer research projects I completed for an Honors class called The Silk Road and Beyond. 

As an English major with a double concentration in literature and professional writing and rhetoric, I was required to conduct research in each area. My Honors thesis was related to PWR, so my literature senior seminar project was situatied in different field. The second document here represents the final product of my work in this class and my one of first experiences reading a text through a specific theoretical lens.

The final documents comprise two posters I created for conferences in the past year. These serve as visual representations of a small section of my larger project and are intended to be conversation-starters in which the audience is engaging with the document. This is a unique rhetorical situation because the majority of the discourse is spoken, not written, so the poster needs to be eye catching and clear, but not overwhelmingly detailed.

Research has been my central focus as an undergraduate, and these projects have been formative to my identity as a writer and a researcher. Because I plan to go to graduate school, I will continue to hone my research skills over the next two years and expand them into different contexts.