These are “ah-ha!” moments from ENG 110, section G in spring 2019.  Students captured some breakthrough moments from their work on the final significant writing project and I’ve assembled them here. 

Throughout this process of writing our final project, I feel like I have had many different moments that have affected me in a sort of aha moment kind of way. One of these was in peer review groups, in my essay I include an argument about the economic aspect of animals and how they help to affect many different industries. I was not sure if it was something I should be keeping in my paper but, during peer review Nick said that it was an interesting take of the topic and was glad I included it in there because he had not thought of it before. It was cool to see that my idea sparked some creativity for someone else. Another moment was during a class discussion, it was when we were talking about our writing processes and how many people use music when they are writing. Elena also mentioned how she writes in a similar way as me and has to completely write out the paper then go through and fix or rewrite drafts from there. The discussion made me realize that my strategies of writing were not insane and that they were used by others as well. After this paper, I overall have come to the acceptance that knowing how to write a well written paper is an extremely important skill in my future. Overall, I will have to write well thought out projects in any field I decide to go into and I truly believe this class will have helped me improve my skills and allow me to be successful.

—Julia Moore

I was having difficulty starting to write this paper because there were a couple of directions I was excited to write about. After writing my 500 words I had my ah ha moment and I completely changed my ideas and I restarted the paper completely. My initial 500 words I tried to talk about a many ideas, but I found that I never enjoyed writing the paper and I did not like where it was going because I felt like I was never going to get to my point. For the next draft of 1000 words I began by setting the main idea, so I would only have one topic to write about. I was eager to write and I wrote over 1000 words for the peer review draft which lead me to my second ah ha moment. During peer review I knew I wrote a lot without going into all of my sources and they had the general idea that it was because I went into too much depth and summary about each of the articles. One of them said that it felt as though my introduction took forever because I wrote about a paragraph summary for each of the three articles. This made me realize I need to condense what I have so I can get to my point faster.

—Molly Cadogan

I found one of my ah ha moments early on into the paper. Once we had gone over Doughty’s podcast of the openness of death, this brought about a memory from when I was younger. I talk about my puppy that I had gotten to connect with until her passing which I experience at a young age. That personal moment gave an idea on where to go with my paper in the beginning as well as develop the points that were going to be made in the body paragraph. While that was a break through moment, it was hard to do this continuous editing and revising around this idea but was able to keep my composure when recall this specific event. Another moment was recently with my tutor Eric Drown. My thesis wasn’t as developed as I wanted it to be so he had me read over my work to make a conclusion to make a thesis. Once that had been made, I was able to enhance the idea that I wanted to share with the reader. Now that I have a thesis, this made the body paragraphs easier to connect to the main point that I have to relate back too. Another big break through moment was among my peers when editing over our papers. Not just from their words, but looking over their papers help me look into the framework that I had to work on when introducing the other articles for this paper. After looking over, I was able to get a general sense of where I should go to set up my paper in the intro and later body paragraphs.

—Alex Smyth

My first ahah moment for this paper came after my first conversation with you.  It was not only a moment of growth for this paper, but also for me as a person.  I realized that no amount of anxiety surrounding how well written my paper is or how good you think it is will make my paper any better.  What truly makes the difference in my writing is the effort I put into it and what I think of it myself.  I struggled a lot with this concept in high school because I thought the only way I would do well was by doing exactly what was expected of me.  Our conversation made me realize that my thoughts and analysis of the papers is what sets my paper apart from others and that’s the way it’s meant to be.  As long as I think for myself and do as the prompt outlines I don’t need to be so anxious about what I am doing.

The second ahah moment came after peer review.  All three of my group members mentioned that I have a really unique perspective on Maine and lobsters because I was raised so far out of New England that eating and cooking lobsters is really foreign to me.  I guess I didn’t realize the extent to which my culture at home differs from here and how much that can elevate my paper, which as a big fan of Buffalo I think is pretty cool.

—Sydney Wolf

A-ha moments that I have experienced over the course of this class to say the least. For one, I have re-evaluated my morals and recognized that I am a complete hypocrite! Of all the A-ha moments I’ve had, the biggest one was this first realization. While reading the David Foster Wallace piece, I found myself feeling bad for lobsters even though I don’t personally participate in eating them. I have never eaten a lobster before, and now I am certain that I never, ever will. Although I don’t contribute to the barbaric preparation of lobster, I do eat meat. Or at least I did. I had limits – I ate mostly white meat, ate pork or beef on occasion, and never ate any kind of seafood simply because I don’t care for the taste of it. Every time I ate meat, I tried not to think about it. You know, the hypocrisy of feeling bad about eating an animal but doing it anyways. In a perfect world, I would live without harming any organism in any way, shape, or form. Unfortunately, that is extremely difficult to do. I ate meat because I needed the dietary nutrition it provided. I heard about vegetarians who would experience low energy levels, hair loss, and some other effects that, quite frankly, scared me a little. I didn’t want to risk it. DFW made me realize that in order to not hate myself at the end of the day, I should give a plant-based diet a shot. It took about a week to research and find new go-to meals that would supply me with all my dietary needs, but today I feel so much better about myself. I don’t miss meat at all; the thought or sight of it disgusts me because now I know that every cut of meat came from an animal that was hurting when it was killed (this is not what I expected to feel over a few months’ time after eating meat all my life. I thought I would struggle with meat cravings, not disgust). With the help of other articles throughout the course (“Animals Like Us”, “What the Crows Know”, etc.) I have learned to regard animals with a much higher standard than I ever have before. Because of these articles, starting with the one A-ha moment from DFW, I have turned a large part of my lifestyle around and changed the way I think about the world. In doing so, I have more closely aligned the way I carry out my life with my fundamental beliefs and morals. I have a long way to go still, but I think I have taken a step in the right direction.

—Elena Shippey

My Ah Ha moment with this paper came really in two spurts. The first one came when the paper was assigned. When we, as a class, unwrapped paper three I felt like this paper was finally the opportunity for me to really pour a lot of myself into it. Thus, when I found out about the level of freedom that we had on this paper, a million ideas flooded to my brain. It was the first time this class that I didn’t have to wrestle with what angle I wanted to approach the paper with. The second Ah Ha moment came during peer review. As much of a powerful entrance I had to this paper I seemed to have lost steam when I was entering into my third paragraph. Along with that I really struggle with the idea of how to end a paper properly. That is until I sat down with Lyle and Kendra for peer review and they had a discussion with me about where this paper might be going. I don’t remember the exact words that they had told me although I do remember having this epiphany that a conclusion is not a summary of what you talked about but rather a final destination for your thoughts. I realized from this discussion that it was more about letting your discussion come to a closing point rather than a summary of what you talked about.

—Haley Gagne

So far, this project has been difficult to write since there is so much information to cover. I think peer review helped a lot; it allowed me to see where I can improve in my paper and see things from others’ perspectives. I realized what I could do to make my argument stronger when someone in my peer review group pointed out that I was interacting with the texts too much. I was also just explaining the quotes I used rather than connecting them to my thesis. It was suggested that I explain my own opinion or personal experiences with some of the specific issues discussed in this paper (for example, where I stand in the troubled middle), and I thought this was a good way to strengthen my argument. I also find myself making connections between DFW and other articles, and constantly consider changing my sources. I know for a fact that I want to use Herzog’s piece, but the third source is subject to change. I found that DFW and Caitlin Doughty both touch on the human tendency to ignore serious issues that make us uncomfortable such as maltreatment of animals and death, which connects to our values and morals as humans and how we perpetuate the cycle of suffering. I am also making connections between Anderson’s piece and DFW; it might be interesting to bring the concept of animal consciousness to the reader’s attention first and then talk about the ethics and morality of eating them.

—Erica Verville

Project number three has for sure presented a ton of challenges to me. Whilst writing this paper there have been some very tough things to do such as finding the right quotes to support my ideas and connect with quotes from other articles. When I finally find some great evidence from articles it is a great feeling because you can now move on and progress with your ideas. And sometimes it is even more fun to read articles such as when I was reading “What the Crow Knows” by Ross Anderson. I was searching for a quote to back up why we value certain species more than others but I came across a quote that described the way animals are treated and completely dropped my previous idea and started a whole new train of thought. This was my first ‘Aha!’ moment of this paper. Next, it was when I realized I wanted to reword my thesis since it did not seem broad enough for me to explore within my own opinions and remain open to other ideas. This actually took a lot longer than I thought it would because it is hard to make a sentence that doesn’t seem too long and still expresses a lot of thought.

—Steven Imbrenda

The “Aha!” moments for this paper are definitely few and far between. This project has been beyond challenging, but one of the moments where a lightbulb did go off for me was in class. We had a class discussion after breaking into groups to analyze “Against Meat” and were asked to make connections between that and other texts. Somewhere in the midst of all of that, a lightbulb went off in my head when I realized I could relate David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” to Hal Herzog’s “Animals Like Us” with the concept of the troubled middle. This helped me make an important point in my paper regarding how humans consider things. Thte “troubled middle” is essentially a gray area for human consideration regarding animals, which ties in with my main point of why we consider things differently.

The other “Aha!” moment I had for this paper came from this same discussion in class. It was a frenzy of everyone connecting different texts to other each other and I was frantically typing notes hoping I could use some of it for this project. One of the connections I realized in my head was that David Foster Wallace talks about a lack of consideration for animals, while Caitlin Doughty talks about our lack of consideration of death. While these two topics focus on different types of consideration, I think it’s still a useful connection.

—Lyle Massoia

For me, I think my most significant breakthrough moment came fairly early on during the process of synthesizing a coherent argument for project three. Initially, I struggled in finding a feasible angle through which to convey my ideas and convictions in both a unified as well as a persuasive way. This resulted in a collection of several other obstacles which proved problematic during the process of preparing my argument. Some of these cascading issues were which texts I was to choose to integrate into my text as well as determining how, specifically, these texts related to my argument. My solution was simply to write what I could pertaining to the ideas presented in David Foster Wallace’s piece. As I wrote, I began to generate more and more ideas which I was ultimately able to culminate into a thesis (of tentative language). I typically wait until my paper is mostly written until I perfect the wording of my thesis statement as I believe the ideas guiding my writing are more important than how they are written. Looking back, the challenges I faced initially were minimal, yet still significant in that they were part of the first stages of creating my text. In order to overcome these obstacles, I was forced to think critically about what values I find are true concerning both myself as well as other people which enabled me to approach Foster Wallace’s ideas from several angles until I was able to deliberate my own opinion which I was both convinced of as well as prepared to attempt to attempt at persuading others.

—Galen Arnold

I feel the biggest aha moment I’ve had was Toward the beginning of the paper when I had initially settled into what I wanted to write about. The moment came when I realized that I could tie all three pieces into environmental effects. I am pretty passionate about environmental issues and that has long standing been my biggest self conflict with eating meat. Meat is raised in conditions that I have known were poor for the environment yet I continue to eat meat. So when I realized that I could have a strong argument using the articles provided and continue to talk about my environmental perspective it felt like a breakthrough moment. From there it has been pretty easy to identify the quotes I want to use because there are few regarding the environment in each passage but the ones there are really work for my essay. I feel like because of this breakthrough moment, writing the paper is much easier than it would have been if I was writing only about my interpretations of the articles but because of this breakthrough moment, I feel I have been really able to connect with my writing and the pieces provided. This connection has really helped me to write a piece I enjoy and still fulfill the assignment. It has also given my essay a very unique perspective as I dive into not only the business of industrial farming but also industrial agriculture and its effects on the environment. So my biggest Aha moment was just finding the topic I wanted to write about.

—Ryan Zimmermann

This project has been the hardest one for me so far. There was just so many things that I wanted to get down on the paper, and I found it hard to narrow down what I wanted to say to three sources and only a few examples. Before doing peer review, I was having a really hard time picking the sources I wanted to use for this project and also picking out the quotes and evidence that I wanted to use too. During my peer review session, Sydney, Jack, and Ryan really helped me get through this rough patch. It was like the light at the end of the tunnel for me, honestly. They helped me think about some things in the articles that would go really well with the topics that I had already mentioned in my paper, and even mentioned things that they thought would go well with the topics that I mentioned to make my paper more interesting. My group brought subjects to light that I never thought about before, which really helped me form my thinking. I also found that I wanted change the sources I was going to use after dong the peer review. Since this peer review, I now know all the things I want to talk about, the sources I am going to use, and the connections I want to make them. My peer review group really helped me out for this project, and I think this was was the best and most helpful peer review I have done this semester. Peer review is something that has been oddly helpful for me, and the reason I say oddly is because I never thought it was something worth doing. However, after having the helpful sessions that I have had over the semester I can now see the value in doing a peer review.

—Maggie Nishan

While I was working on the assignment of 1000 words to post online and to then share with the members in my group for the peer review session, I ran into a main problem, I had no idea where to go. I had two giant paragraphs for my introduction and that was it. I had written one paragraph to introduce ideas and concepts that I wanted to discuss in my paper. Following this, I realized I still needed to mention in some depth the sources I was planning on using. This was the reasoning for the second introductory paragraph. After these two paragraphs had been completed, I realized I had talked way too much about different concepts in this intro. Therefore, when I continuously attempted to start body paragraphs for any of these concepts I did not know how to start without being repetitive from what I had already discussed in one of my first two paragraphs. My “AHA Moment” presented itself during my peer review session in class. Both of my peers were able to point out that the second of the two paragraphs was more of an introduction while the first paragraph was full of potential beginnings to a number of separate body paragraphs. Not only did they suggest this global comment, they were also able to suggest specific places for new paragraphs and new concepts along with potential source ideas. After listening to their suggestions, I was able to better visualize both how to continue writing my paper along with what the overall piece could potentially end up looking like.

—Kendra Murray

I had a significant AH HA moment during peer review not only about my essay but about my personal values regarding meat and food.  Rob pointed out that about halfway through my essay I switched from using the word “they” to “we” when talking about Americans and American habits.  Not only does this present an inconsistency in my essay, but also an inconsistency in who I identify with.  I did this without even realizing it.  It seems that in the introduction of my essay when I was talking about the tendency of Americans to avoid and pretend that certain practices surrounding meat and the treatment of animals do not exist, that I was trying to distance myself from this idea by saying “they”.  Later, I starting using “we”.  This indicates to me a shift in my thinking while writing from “I don’t think this way” to “maybe I am at fault here too”.

Another AH HA moment that I experienced was Molly pointed out a few places in my essay where she noticed overlap between what I was saying about one source relating to another source.  This was helpful because she showed me where I might be able to connect David Foster Wallace to Herzog and Herzog to Doughty.  By doing this, my essay will have better flow between paragraphs.

—Jordyn Sullivan

The title of the page borrows from that great Doors song.  I’m thinking of it in terms of a way to connect different classes in a conversation about breakthroughs.  Of course, Jim Morrison and co were probably thinking about a million other things.  Anyway, maybe check out this blast from the past.