Blog Post #6 - Consider the Lobster

Consider the Lobster is most definitely a research paper, but done in a way that is different from most others. Rather than using interviews or websites containing vast amounts of knowledge to aid him to answer his question, he uses simple, common knowledge, such as definitions, and comes up with an answer to his question by himself. It reminds me a lot of the research paper I had to write senior year of high school, where there was no “correct” answer, just any answer that can be backed by a reasonable concept. Based on this, the only thing about the paper that challenged my idea of the genre was the fact that it was actually fairly interesting to read. Typically, at least for me, research papers have covered topics such as politics, history, etc., but then there are ones like Consider the Lobster that delve into topics that don’t have a correct answer or two. It’s a research paper of the mind, your own mind. It is for this reason, that any answer is correct. All minds are different, and so if it’s a research paper of the mind, there are infinitely different answers. The paper is also structured similar to a newspaper article, which I found odd at first, but then realized could potentially be useful. Specifically the quotes that were expanded in the middle of a page in order to emphasize a point.