Abhijit Mehta
Reflection on w2.d3
When I initially thought of the idea for my essay, I drew upon my own personal experiences with math and other math people. I have always been particularly amused by the way that mathematicians use the word “nice,” so that seemed like a logical place to start my essay. However, as the first draft developed, the sense of playfulness which mathematicians have that I was trying to explain became obscured by my effort to provide a large amount of data regarding various words used by mathematicians and physicists. To remedy this, my agenda shifted from merely trying to describe how mathematicians and physicists use certain words differently from the general public (in my first draft) to describing how mathematicians and physicists have a playful attitude that is reflected in their vocabulary.
One general change that I made in my paper to reflect this shift in agenda was to bring myself into the essay. Rather than trying to act as an impartial bystander like I did in my first draft, I wanted to become an active part of the essay, so I replaced “they” with “we” when referring to mathematicians to share some of my enthusiasm for math with the reader.
I also tried to make it more clear in the various sections of my essay that the examples I was using had a point: to show the playful attitude of mathematicians and physicists. I did this by adding sections to the ends of certain paragraphs that explicitly discussed how the preceding examples showed that mathematicians or physicists are playful people. To further illustrate this point, I added a section to my first draft that discussed a conversation between members of the 1999 United States International Math Olympiad team, and showed how mathematicians can readily adapt common words to describe their ideas.
One of the biggest changes I made was altering my introduction. In my earlier drafts, I started out by talking about society in general, and then I went on to say almost nothing about society in my paper. However, throughout the course of the essay, I did point to the fact that my examples somehow contradicted a popular stereotype. So, I decided that it would be better to introduce my essay by discussing how the popular stereotypes of mathematicians and physicists are wrong. I saved much of the material that I cut from my introduction and put it into my conclusion. My conclusion comments on how necessary it is for society to begin to understand math and science in our modern world, (hopefully) leaving the reader with a new idea.
Another major change occurred in my discussion of quarks and other physics terms. Initially, this section was very weak, and I gave the reader a little bit of etymology, at best. In my final draft, I tried to expand my discussion of these words, and use the words to support my argument that mathematicians and physicists are fun, playful, and imaginative.
The main change in focus of my essay was from giving a lot of examples to analyzing the attitudes of mathematicians and physicists. Although I was able to use all of the examples from my first draft in my final draft, the agenda of my final draft is much more interesting than that of my first draft, and the entire paper is much more personal and analytical than my first draft was. In my final draft, I have tried to bring to the paper that personal enthusiasm that inspired me to choose math and physics as a topic for my essay in the first place.