Frederick Douglass Paper
Process Paper
For this year’s I.P., I picked Frederick Douglass to be my topic. The reason I picked him was because he was a great man and a well known abolitionist figure. He dedicated his life to opposing slavery. I have always admired Douglass since my first grade teacher told my class about him. Once I researched a little about him, mainly the time period of his life, I realized he was a perfect choice for my I.P. topic. He interested me and I could easily get plenty of information on him. I knew that all the information I needed was out there, I just needed to go out and find it. I went to my local library and checked out books on my topic. Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity, and that’s not an excuse for underachieving. I checked out three or four really effective books, a few that could be categorized as multigenre themselves. They contained both primary and secondary documents. Secondly, I researched him on the internet; and I don’t mean googling “Frederick Douglass.” I searched specific things like “Frederick Douglass as a slave” and “Frederick Douglass’ escape.” This allowed me to narrow the “millions” of results one always gets when using Google. I received plenty of good websites that I could use that summarized his whole life. I picked multigenre as my presentation category and its obvious why. Frederick Douglass’ life was a multigenre in a sense. He wrote letters and poems and narratives all about his life and slavery. He personified slavery and did all he could to abolish it. A multigenre would best represent Douglass and his life. In order to make my multigenre effective in “moving” the reader, I had to look at one of the examples Mrs. Jackson provided me with. Using that as a template, I wrote poems and short stories appropriate to the time period that related to the idea of the wrongness of slavery and Douglass. I found pictures that illustrated Douglass’ ideas, as well as drew a few of my own. I tried to picture myself as a
For this year’s I.P., I picked Frederick Douglass to be my topic. The reason I picked him was because he was a great man and a well known abolitionist figure. He dedicated his life to opposing slavery. I have always admired Douglass since my first grade teacher told my class about him. Once I researched a little about him, mainly the time period of his life, I realized he was a perfect choice for my I.P. topic. He interested me and I could easily get plenty of information on him. I knew that all the information I needed was out there, I just needed to go out and find it. I went to my local library and checked out books on my topic. Remember, it’s about quality, not quantity, and that’s not an excuse for underachieving. I checked out three or four really effective books, a few that could be categorized as multigenre themselves. They contained both primary and secondary documents. Secondly, I researched him on the internet; and I don’t mean googling “Frederick Douglass.” I searched specific things like “Frederick Douglass as a slave” and “Frederick Douglass’ escape.” This allowed me to narrow the “millions” of results one always gets when using Google. I received plenty of good websites that I could use that summarized his whole life. I picked multigenre as my presentation category and its obvious why. Frederick Douglass’ life was a multigenre in a sense. He wrote letters and poems and narratives all about his life and slavery. He personified slavery and did all he could to abolish it. A multigenre would best represent Douglass and his life. In order to make my multigenre effective in “moving” the reader, I had to look at one of the examples Mrs. Jackson provided me with. Using that as a template, I wrote poems and short stories appropriate to the time period that related to the idea of the wrongness of slavery and Douglass. I found pictures that illustrated Douglass’ ideas, as well as drew a few of my own. I tried to picture myself as a
Bibliography: Turley, David. Slavery. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Print. [This book gets into great detail of the what a slave would experience and what a slave owner would experience which really helped me with my multigenre] Douglass, Frederick Vernellia, Randall. "No Struggle No Progress." autoredirect to main site. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://academic.udayton.edu/vernelliarandall/poetry/> [This website had a poem that I used in my multigenre. It was a primary source]