Most Helpful Feedback
I think the most helpful feedback was to include fewer statistics and facts and more analysis. Sometimes I can get caught up on just proving something with evidence and spend too little time actually analyzing and developing my arguments.
Most Interesting Discoveries
One of the most interesting discoveries I made was how badly loneliness can affect someone. Some scientists believe that loneliness is on the same level as smoking daily and obesity. To me, it is mind-blowing that a mental state of mind can have such detrimental and life-threatening effects on your actual physical being. I think the discoveries we are making about mental health are only the beginning and there are sadly probably way more harmful effects of poor mental health that we are not aware of.
Significance of the Shift
I think the significance of the shift is fairly obvious. As I just discussed, loneliness is terrible for your mental health and actually decreases the average lifespan. The most important point for a reader to take away from this paper is to not downplay mental illnesses, whether that be loneliness, depression, or anything else. We must continue to shed light on mental illness and encourage those in need of help to reach out and others to check in on their friends and family.
How This Project Helped Me Develop as a Writer
I think the biggest thing that I learned from writing this paper is how to effectively use evidence to increase the validity of my arguments and analysis. So far, it’s the longest paper I’ve written so it helped me to better manage the space and amount of words that I’m using per paragraph. I’m also beginning to better understand how to actually make points and prove them. I feel like most of my high school writing was just random statements that loosely tied to the topic.