First Draft

After my meeting with Professor Marsh, I felt a lot more confident about the topic that I want to write. I had first started with the idea of writing about how celebrities affect our daily lives. In my first draft my central question was: “Why are we so mesmerized by people who are just like you and me?” But then I realized that this topic is way to board and there are so many topics I could write about this. So I finally decided to narrow it down to how the feminine ideal has changed throughout the years. If you were to look at a magazine from thirty to forty years ago and compare them to the women now they would be considered fat. One of the reasons for this is because the idea of the “perfect women” has changed. Personally I don’t think it has changed for the better. I will probably be researching how and why the ideal of the perfect women has changed throughout the years and finding the history of what the perfect woman was back then and now. I guess my central question now would be: How has the ideal of the perfect woman changed from today’s standards to the standards of thirty years ago?
I guess one of my major objectives for this project is to show how the ideal if the perfect woman has changed throughout the years and basically to show girls that what could be hot and in style today may not be tomorrow and just to be happy with who they are. One of the things that I hope to accomplish is basically to show that maybe being who you are in the long run is better than trying to fit in with what society thinks is the perfect woman because that will only last for so long until another “it girl” comes along and everyone will want to look like her. Now that I fee like my idea for this project has evolved more I feel more confident in what I want my “end product” to be but I am still torn between two things. First I was thinking of creating a power point presentation with handouts of the class. My slide show would show women throughout the years going as far back to 1940’s to now and to show how the “ideal woman” has changed. The second thing that I was thinking of for my “end product” of making a website incorporating some of the same ideas from the power point presentation into the website. But I still don’t really know what I should do for my end product. All I know is that I want it to be something that will grab the class’s attention and not put them to sleep.
I feel like I will need to begin by using google. Besides google, other sources that I am going to use are magazine and newspaper articles. Now that I changed my topic and made it more specific, I don’t know if I will really need to conduct interviews. I feel like a survey will only get my so far and if I do create a survey I will document it by posting it to my blog and creating a separate section for my second research paper. I really don’t think that I will need to do a lot of research in the library because most of it I could do sitting from my house. But I think I could use the library to look for old magazine and newspaper articles on my topic. I will definitely have to do a lot of online research and I will also have to find a lot of pictures. Pictures will definitely be one of the biggest parts of my report because my report deals with how the appearance of the perfect woman has changed throughout the years. The best place to document all my information is in my folder or in my blog, but for my it’s easier in my folder because I like having things hands on and I like to be able to write on the articles that I get.