In the conclusion of my first draft, I tried to "wrap things up" neatly and write the kind of conclusion that I liked to write in other types of classes. But, I realized that that would be what I didn't want: unauthentic and boring. I decided to not try to answer a question or to summarize my argument. By going back to my personal experience missing the penalty kick, I closed up the essay with the second half of the bookend I started at the beginning. I also made it clear that I didn't have any one answer to the question of what the relationship between fans and athletes is and how it can influence the outcome of an event. There is no one answer to this question, and the purpose of my essay was to merely explore a few options and to let my thoughts go down a rabbit hole.

Here, I made the connection between two separate ideas that I had been working towards. In my first draft, I feel like I was being too artificial and linear with my writing, which didn't reflect what was going on in my head. In this draft, I decided to have my writing be more real, as tried to write down what I was thinking about the topic as it was coming to me. I think that this made the essay feel more like an authentic inquiry to me, not just another writing assignment for a class.

Here is a moment where I decided to go on a bit of a tangent away from my main focus. I let my mind wander as I made connections, and let my writing follow it. Even though it wavers from the idea of the fan-athlete relationship, I think the part about animal behavior makes it so the essay flows better from examples to possible explanations. My essay doesn't answer a question, but this explanation of how home field advantage could be part of a larger theme in animals makes it more credible for the reader. Before, I would have been unsure about doing something like this in an essay, but I thought it was a useful connection to make as it relates the topic to something like animal behavior that I was only able to come to by letting my thoughts go down the rabbit hole.

When discussing professional sports stadiums themselves, I changed the angle of approach of my writing so that instead of focusing on the physical aspects of the venues, I instead talked more about the relationship between the stadium, the fans, and the athletes. This better aligns with the themes of my essay, which is about person to person interactions.

I decided to start my essay describing a personal experience that had lead me to think about the topic of the essay, as I thought that it would serve as both a good hook to entice the reader and as the first half of a bookend of the essay. By beginning and ending with a moment that related to me and how the topic related to me, I thought that I would make the reader see where I was coming from. I had originally started with a broad statement about sports venues, but realized that it was slightly cliche and didn't add much to what I was trying to achieve.

In the conclusion of my first draft, I tried to "wrap things up" neatly and write the kind of conclusion that I liked to write in other types of classes. But, I realized that that would be what I didn't want: unauthentic and boring. I decided to not try to answer a question or to summarize my argument. By going back to my personal experience missing the penalty kick, I closed up the essay with the second half of the bookend I started at the beginning. I also made it clear that I didn't have any one answer to the question of what the relationship between fans and athletes is and how it can influence the outcome of an event. There is no one answer to this question, and the purpose of my essay was to merely explore a few options and to let my thoughts go down a rabbit hole.

Here is a moment where I decided to go on a bit of a tangent away from my main focus. I let my mind wander as I made connections, and let my writing follow it. Even though it wavers from the idea of the fan-athlete relationship, I think the part about animal behavior makes it so the essay flows better from examples to possible explanations. My essay doesn't answer a question, but this explanation of how home field advantage could be part of a larger theme in animals makes it more credible for the reader. Before, I would have been unsure about doing something like this in an essay, but I thought it was a useful connection to make as it relates the topic to something like animal behavior that I was only able to come to by letting my thoughts go down the rabbit hole.

I decided to start my essay describing a personal experience that had lead me to think about the topic of the essay, as I thought that it would serve as both a good hook to entice the reader and as the first half of a bookend of the essay. By beginning and ending with a moment that related to me and how the topic related to me, I thought that I would make the reader see where I was coming from. I had originally started with a broad statement about sports venues, but realized that it was slightly cliche and didn't add much to what I was trying to achieve.

Here, I made the connection between two separate ideas that I had been working towards. In my first draft, I feel like I was being too artificial and linear with my writing, which didn't reflect what was going on in my head. In this draft, I decided to have my writing be more real, as tried to write down what I was thinking about the topic as it was coming to me. I think that this made the essay feel more like an authentic inquiry to me, not just another writing assignment for a class.

When discussing professional sports stadiums themselves, I changed the angle of approach of my writing so that instead of focusing on the physical aspects of the venues, I instead talked more about the relationship between the stadium, the fans, and the athletes. This better aligns with the themes of my essay, which is about person to person interactions.

This essay was a response paper to "Consider the Lobster", to which we were writing to a question about a passage we found particularly interesting or challenging. I thought that this was one of the most interesting pieces of writing we have read this year, so I wanted to go back to it. I liked my original response, but I wanted to go back to it and relate it to something else that I only thought of weeks after completing the piece. By going deeper than the realms of Foster Wallace's piece, and relating it to books I read for other classes, I could make the essay more powerful and mean more to me and the reader.

I decided to change the focus of my essay and broaden it to relate relishing in the pain of animals to human beings. I am very interested in history and love learning about how people's beliefs change over time under different circumstances, so this piqued my interest in the topic.

Here, I changed my essay so that it relates to a broader theme of humans celebrating in the pain of other animals, not just lobsters. I think that this will make readers realize that there are examples of festivals or events like this in many cultures around the world, some where fighting an animal, or making animals fight each other is seen as enjoyable.