Altruism and Empathy Reflection
by Grace Snyder
Dear Dr. Kate,
Hello! Thank you for taking the time to read my connecting fairy tales essay that I have been diligently working on since February. I’m going to tell you a little bit more about myself, so hopefully you will understand my thought processes behind the choices I made in writing and editing this paper in a more meaningful way. Choosing to integrate psychology topics with my English paper was an easy choice. Psychology, being my major, is my passion in life—I want to be a psychologist when I “grow up,” and English, my minor, is something I’ve held near and dear to my heart since way back when in middle school. I have been told I’m a good writer since as long as I can remember writing assigned papers in school, because like many of my fellow English minors and majors, it is something that came naturally to me. But, I’ve always wanted more critical input in my writing, so taking more advanced English classes throughout high school and college gave me the chance to grow as a writer. For the rest of this reflection, I will tell you about the initial writing process, what my thoughts were behind the decisions I made in writing and editing, and how this essay meets the goals and expectations of the class.
When I chose the connecting tales option for my essay, I already had a few ideas of psychology topics floating around from previous stories. Keeping in mind Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin, I looked through my old social psychology notebook to see if any topics jumped out at me. Finding the theories on helping, I realized that it was perfect for those two stories. Both showed great examples of the three main theories. While the two I had showed promise, I knew I wanted a third story to add to my essay. I read through the Zipes collection of stories and found Cagliuso. We had just read it as a class and I thought it fit in perfectly with the theories of helping. After writing my first draft we had a peer review day in class. My peers told me to cut down on summary and to focus more on the thesis, as a lot of my paper outlined the storylines. They also told me to include a secondary source. Taking their suggestions into account, I cut out some summary and cleaned up the edges to focus more on the thesis. I then researched psychology articles to add to my discussion of the theses. Once I was satisfied with those edits, I emailed the essay to you to look over for me. You told me to make the paper focus more on the fairy tales, and less on the psychology of the stories. What do these fairy tales tell us about helping and the social psychology theories? Not, what does psychology tell us about the fairy tales. This is when most of the change happened. I completely reworded my two paragraphs on secondary sources, and changed the focus around in the conclusion. I believe my paper was very strong after your suggestions were taken into account.
Following my second editing stage, you asked us as a class to implement two secondary sources and three digital elements, as well as visit the writing center. I read psychology blogs online and found two great articles discussing helping in fairy tales and in nature to add to my argument. We had just discussed Emily Carroll’s web-comic His Face All Red, and I really enjoyed it, so I decided to look into more of her work. I quickly found The Three Snake Leaves and it was perfect for my topic. I added three pictures with captions to add some flair and more evidence to the paper. After making these changes, I had an online consultation with the writing center. My reader was, to be quite honest, not that helpful because she didn’t really seem to understand my thesis. She asked me to change the focus from supernatural/secondary characters vs. heroes/primary characters, but that being in my thesis, I decided against that suggestion. Her cleaning up edits were great, though, and I edited some grammatical/word choice errors. I sent my essay to you again at this point, to which your only suggestion was to remove some repetition. I agreed with you, and edited the sentences that were repeated almost like stock sentences, to add variation.
I believe my paper meets the goals and expectations of this class. Writing the essay helped me understand more of Propp’s fairy tale structure, specifically the character outline, as well as the common archetypes found in fairy tales (“The Hero” and “The Helper”). I discussed the latter more than the former, as I used Propp mainly to introduce the prevalence of helping in fairy tales, but they were both very helpful in the writing of the essay itself. Reading these fairy tales prompted me to read their originals and some adaptations written later on. I felt I needed a stronger background on Rapunzel’s origin, so I read Rapunzel by Friedrich Schulz and Persinette by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force. This paper shows that I can comment effectively on the major themes of literary works, as well as look more deeply for themes that might not ordinarily be discussed. I also efficiently located and evaluated source materials that were socially and culturally relevant to my topic. Along with all of these goals, I responded to the three literary texts with an essay that analyzed, synthesized, interpreted, and assessed meaning, significance, and similarity between all three.
In deciding my future profession in psychology, I knew it had to incorporate writing in some way. I can’t live a life without writing! Doing research in social and clinical psychology means I will be writing and co-writing a plethora of research papers, and in being a clinical psychologist seeing patients, I’ll write case studies on special patients. Maybe even a book or two. In order to keep my writing skill refined and current, I knew I had to make English my minor, and that’s probably the best decision I’ve made in college. Writing this paper has helped me to fully merge the ideas, the teachings, and the styles of English and psychology. They are so different in writing styles, but are so similar in ideas and teachings. Both English and psychology struggle to make sense of the world around us—one strives to define and quantify, while the other attempts to understand and explain in new ways. Writing in psychology is full of repetition and definition, and writing in English can be anything you would like it to be. Merging these two topics together in this one essay will help me for the rest of my life.
So what does this have to do with my topic? Helping people isn’t a huge issue in literature, because as I discussed, almost every fairy tale character helps one another. It doesn’t need to be a huge issue since it’s so universal. That being said, it’s a huge deal in psychology, specifically social psychology. Social psychologists want to quantify behavior and helping mystifies them—it goes against most of what they believe about human nature. Psychologists see behavior as selfish and helping another human being for seemingly no gains does not compute with them. They can’t help themselves; they are so negative about human nature and in their beliefs after running countless studies that showed evidence for it. Being in classes that discuss human nature, its flaws and its weaknesses, for almost two years now can be mentally tiring. English classes that discuss how we don’t have to live restrained by the chains of society and its rules, were a great way to keep me thinking in multiple ways at all times. Psychology is not always negative. It can tend to seem that way when scientific, empirical evidence shows humans do things that are inherently selfish all of the time, just as English/literature is not always rainbows and lollipops. I hope this essay helps you merge some of your conflicting ideas, as it has helped me, and thank you so much for taking the time to read my English 351 final portfolio.
Hello! Thank you for taking the time to read my connecting fairy tales essay that I have been diligently working on since February. I’m going to tell you a little bit more about myself, so hopefully you will understand my thought processes behind the choices I made in writing and editing this paper in a more meaningful way. Choosing to integrate psychology topics with my English paper was an easy choice. Psychology, being my major, is my passion in life—I want to be a psychologist when I “grow up,” and English, my minor, is something I’ve held near and dear to my heart since way back when in middle school. I have been told I’m a good writer since as long as I can remember writing assigned papers in school, because like many of my fellow English minors and majors, it is something that came naturally to me. But, I’ve always wanted more critical input in my writing, so taking more advanced English classes throughout high school and college gave me the chance to grow as a writer. For the rest of this reflection, I will tell you about the initial writing process, what my thoughts were behind the decisions I made in writing and editing, and how this essay meets the goals and expectations of the class.
When I chose the connecting tales option for my essay, I already had a few ideas of psychology topics floating around from previous stories. Keeping in mind Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin, I looked through my old social psychology notebook to see if any topics jumped out at me. Finding the theories on helping, I realized that it was perfect for those two stories. Both showed great examples of the three main theories. While the two I had showed promise, I knew I wanted a third story to add to my essay. I read through the Zipes collection of stories and found Cagliuso. We had just read it as a class and I thought it fit in perfectly with the theories of helping. After writing my first draft we had a peer review day in class. My peers told me to cut down on summary and to focus more on the thesis, as a lot of my paper outlined the storylines. They also told me to include a secondary source. Taking their suggestions into account, I cut out some summary and cleaned up the edges to focus more on the thesis. I then researched psychology articles to add to my discussion of the theses. Once I was satisfied with those edits, I emailed the essay to you to look over for me. You told me to make the paper focus more on the fairy tales, and less on the psychology of the stories. What do these fairy tales tell us about helping and the social psychology theories? Not, what does psychology tell us about the fairy tales. This is when most of the change happened. I completely reworded my two paragraphs on secondary sources, and changed the focus around in the conclusion. I believe my paper was very strong after your suggestions were taken into account.
Following my second editing stage, you asked us as a class to implement two secondary sources and three digital elements, as well as visit the writing center. I read psychology blogs online and found two great articles discussing helping in fairy tales and in nature to add to my argument. We had just discussed Emily Carroll’s web-comic His Face All Red, and I really enjoyed it, so I decided to look into more of her work. I quickly found The Three Snake Leaves and it was perfect for my topic. I added three pictures with captions to add some flair and more evidence to the paper. After making these changes, I had an online consultation with the writing center. My reader was, to be quite honest, not that helpful because she didn’t really seem to understand my thesis. She asked me to change the focus from supernatural/secondary characters vs. heroes/primary characters, but that being in my thesis, I decided against that suggestion. Her cleaning up edits were great, though, and I edited some grammatical/word choice errors. I sent my essay to you again at this point, to which your only suggestion was to remove some repetition. I agreed with you, and edited the sentences that were repeated almost like stock sentences, to add variation.
I believe my paper meets the goals and expectations of this class. Writing the essay helped me understand more of Propp’s fairy tale structure, specifically the character outline, as well as the common archetypes found in fairy tales (“The Hero” and “The Helper”). I discussed the latter more than the former, as I used Propp mainly to introduce the prevalence of helping in fairy tales, but they were both very helpful in the writing of the essay itself. Reading these fairy tales prompted me to read their originals and some adaptations written later on. I felt I needed a stronger background on Rapunzel’s origin, so I read Rapunzel by Friedrich Schulz and Persinette by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force. This paper shows that I can comment effectively on the major themes of literary works, as well as look more deeply for themes that might not ordinarily be discussed. I also efficiently located and evaluated source materials that were socially and culturally relevant to my topic. Along with all of these goals, I responded to the three literary texts with an essay that analyzed, synthesized, interpreted, and assessed meaning, significance, and similarity between all three.
In deciding my future profession in psychology, I knew it had to incorporate writing in some way. I can’t live a life without writing! Doing research in social and clinical psychology means I will be writing and co-writing a plethora of research papers, and in being a clinical psychologist seeing patients, I’ll write case studies on special patients. Maybe even a book or two. In order to keep my writing skill refined and current, I knew I had to make English my minor, and that’s probably the best decision I’ve made in college. Writing this paper has helped me to fully merge the ideas, the teachings, and the styles of English and psychology. They are so different in writing styles, but are so similar in ideas and teachings. Both English and psychology struggle to make sense of the world around us—one strives to define and quantify, while the other attempts to understand and explain in new ways. Writing in psychology is full of repetition and definition, and writing in English can be anything you would like it to be. Merging these two topics together in this one essay will help me for the rest of my life.
So what does this have to do with my topic? Helping people isn’t a huge issue in literature, because as I discussed, almost every fairy tale character helps one another. It doesn’t need to be a huge issue since it’s so universal. That being said, it’s a huge deal in psychology, specifically social psychology. Social psychologists want to quantify behavior and helping mystifies them—it goes against most of what they believe about human nature. Psychologists see behavior as selfish and helping another human being for seemingly no gains does not compute with them. They can’t help themselves; they are so negative about human nature and in their beliefs after running countless studies that showed evidence for it. Being in classes that discuss human nature, its flaws and its weaknesses, for almost two years now can be mentally tiring. English classes that discuss how we don’t have to live restrained by the chains of society and its rules, were a great way to keep me thinking in multiple ways at all times. Psychology is not always negative. It can tend to seem that way when scientific, empirical evidence shows humans do things that are inherently selfish all of the time, just as English/literature is not always rainbows and lollipops. I hope this essay helps you merge some of your conflicting ideas, as it has helped me, and thank you so much for taking the time to read my English 351 final portfolio.