Sophomore Essay Draft 2!

Monday I had an advising appointment with Chaplain Radecke to discuss the second draft of my sophomore essay. This draft clocked in at 20 pages, plus a few more for the Works Cited section. I am now transitioning into the tweaking phase which might include adding subheadings for the paper, checking the flow and organization, etc. The most substantial thing I want to do is a bit more work identifying and acknowledging the arguments against my position. My essay argues that the genre of young adult fiction needs to explore religious doubt with more frequency and nuance. It’s been difficult to articulate the arguments against this. I think what I really am opposing is not just poor writing but the commercial concerns that make such poor writing a wise choice, as well as the apathetic stance that it doesn’t matter if such issues are addressed in fiction for teenagers.

I’ve had a really positive experience working on this essay. My passion about the subject hasn’t waned, but has grown. I think it helps that it comes from a very personal place. As a reader of Young Adult fiction, I’ve always been on the lookout for books that talk about spiritual and religious matters in a way that speaks to me, but often I find I can’t relate to the secular Young Adult novels that tackle the issue or those published by Christian publishers.

The intersection of religion and literature has been so interesting to me that I keep thinking about how I want to pursue it in the future. I don’t know if this exploration will mainly focus on my own creative writing and how best to portray spiritual or religious ideas realistically and powerfully or if it may continue in this scholarly direction.

I am excited to complete this essay and be able to more fully share my research with others. One way I’ll be sharing it is through the Sophomore Essay presentations. A few people are giving talks, while the rest of us will be sharing posters and PowerPoints.  Right now, I am trying to figure out how to best share my essay in a PowerPoint.  I think I will focus on making a lot of my points on the overall treatment of religion in the Young Adult genre, what doubt is, the theological and theoretical approaches I reference, etc., on the slides.  Perhaps I will relegate excerpts from Young Adult novels and my analysis of them to print-outs; this seems like it might be easier than trying to cram as much onto my PowerPoint as possible.

Tomorrow, in my Sophomore Essay class, I will be doing a practice presentation, so hopefully I will receive a lot of helpful feedback on how to best translate this topic, which I’m very excited about, to this medium that isn’t exactly captivating me.