The 40-Page Research Paper
Hurtt, Lindsey Kay

>>LINDSEY: The high school research paper, we all harbor fond memories of such bygone writing assignments. Memories of writing teachers proclaiming, "Thesis, thesis, thesis," much as a realtor preaches, "Location, location, location." We all remember with clarity the band of Wikipedia and Google searches. Standards were imposed on the legitimacy of research sources. No longer could facts be articulately invented. It was a time of hours spent in the corners of libraries pouring over books and journals. We attended information sessions where we were trained in the lethal use of library research and catalogs and academic databases and informed of great luck. All these highly prestigious data base available to us lowly high school students and for free. I fell in love. I fed off the writing process like leeches fed off of me and my friends back in the day as five year olds playing in the local stagnant radiation plant pond. I can remember with vibrant clarity my first lengthy ten page research paper assignment. We could choose any topic, any topic in the whole world. The girl who sat next to me chose burlesque dancers. Keeping with the artsy theme I chose Flamenco. 

[Flamenco music plays]

>>LINDSEY: I loved it. I loved the art and the culture and the language but most of all I loved the emotional expression and the fight for freedom and release epitomized in Flamenco. People wielded the song and dance like the Spanish wielded their armada. I was given a precious gift, a tool to harvest my observations and forge my world - words, at my disposal. I can make people see me or, if nothing else, I could at least see myself and know my feeling. My research exposed me to the reflections, emotions, knowledge, opinions, and previous research of those who had gone before me. I was inspired and then I started writing, and writing, and writing, and I wrote nonstop for this one research paper for this one high school class as if my future life's success depended on my take on the lost art of Flamenco. I made my mom, a former linguistics major and elementary school teacher, read my paper about 27 times until she would profess its perfection - probably just so she wouldn't have to read it for the twenty-eighth time. D-day; I brought the paper to class in its own folder baring it to the front of the room like the treasure that it clearly was. I rubberly place it on the teacher's desk, all forty pages of it. I had arrived exuberantly early on this day of days and it was the first in the stack, the mountain of inspired pages. My forty page long masterpiece, which had started out as a ten page research paper, was complete. I left a part of myself on that desk and in a sense I found myself, I found my life's calling. I abandoned my dreams of vet school for a liberal arts education in writing. I got an 'A' on the paper. Sometimes it's the sweetest when the dream finds the human heart and the self allows itself to be discovered.

[Flamenco music plays]