Writing is often a process of draft after draft, rewrite after rewrite; it is difficult, at least for me, to actually be satisfied with a piece before a series of peer review sessions and personal edits. This process of starting anew does not only apply to writing: as I wrote my inquiry-research based paper, I found myself changing my main sources often, debating whether a certain author is worth spending my time on, or whether a certain article would be more advantageous for my paper than something I chose at the beginning of the process.

I have also learned that writing is a realm of silly mistakes. You may feel that your paper is perfect, but given a day or two, cracks in the structure begin to appear. You’ll begin to find poorly worded sentences, low level grammar mistakes, issues with the works cited page and more. I was lucky enough to learn about this process of allowing a final paper to “stew” after a day of finishing in high school, but I fully applied that process for this most recent paper.

My audience was likely made up of academic/educated Americans interested in learning about the current events of Hong Kong. Within my paper, I was in the mindset of writing something that was the cross section of an opinion-editorial and a research paper, with my formatting being loosely based upon how the New York Times will often format their long form articles. Through having my audience be American, they would likely have some historical background on the authoritative practices of the People’s Republic of China, and would further have some awareness of the differences between Hong Kong and mainland China. My paper regardless addresses these things for the minority that do not know, but with the general length of the paper, enough time is provided to do exposition on the topic while also providing some level of advanced analysis and touching upon current events.

I felt that the synthesis part of our paper was the most important section in particular, as it allowed me to finally gather all the information that I had been looking into until that point to begin building the basic framework of my paper. I decided how my paper would be structured (history -> buildup -> modern, current events -> the potential future) based upon what sources I had found, using the best sources in particular to help form this type of paper.