Learning is the Purpose... Or is it to Produce a Paper?

A master of comic rhyme in our time, I had to add him in. :-)

I have had a marvelous time learning all about Rhyming and its origins and development in the English language, but no matter how much I research, I can't seem to find the information I am looking for.  I can't find evidence to support the connections that I have hunches for, but I have found a lot of great information on the device of rhyme and its history throughout our society.  So I am afraid that I am going to write a thesis paper on what I have been learning about even though it doesn't necessarily correlate with the topic assigned to me. 

(I am building my argument... please keep reading...)


I hope my professors can forgive this indiscretion, and applaud me for my self-directed learning, because I have learned within the context of the time period and idea of knowledge institutions, but not within reference works.  It has been a fascinating journey for me through the stacks of books and online tools.  I have spent hours in the library at a computer station with a dictionary always open and a Google window for those words too obscure as I have read book after book, and fished for what I want to learn more about.  I also really enjoyed reading another student's online paper for his English 503 class on a similar topic to what I think I will be writing.  

 It is inexcusable in a way for me to write this paper that is a little off topic and off assignment, but I wanted to work on something that I was interested in, and though it started out as a reference work investigation my research has led me off onto a different path.  So I have learned everything I could possibly learn about the history of rhyme in the past week, and my paper will be a condensation and simplification of the huge amount out there (and especially at the Harold B. Lee Library). 

I guess I would just like to argue that the point of this assignment was to learn more about the time period of 1400-1700 and the influence of print in those centuries on different elements of the literature, art, and knowledge availability in Western Civilization.  I have done that and I will prove it with my paper, though the real purpose is already fulfilled through my research.  I have fulfilled several of the learning outcomes and the ideas of the course, though not of this specific assignment. 

And if you haven't realized by now, writing the actual paper is always the last and shortest part of my writing process.  So I have been doing research and organizing the ideas that I would like to present in my mind, and deciding which sources are valuable enough to even use and which don't provide a scrap for my paper but were interesting anyway.  And for my personal learning style, I wish I could give an oral interview, or presentation or exam, and discuss with someone the ideas that I discovered.  But of course, that would mean we would be back in an oral learning tradition and I wouldn't be able to read all the books that I did and use the internet like I did to gain the information in the first place, and definitely wouldn't be posting this now.  *sigh*  You win some, you lose some. 

Rock those papers guys!! The ones I have read so far have been great!!