Student Inquiries Comparison

            The two student inquiries that I read and analyzed are “Reaching Beyond Hell” and “Why do we need sleep? That is zzz Question.” Both of these inquiries were strong in their research and experimentation. Both authors chose strong sources from experts in the fields that they were drawing from. They drew from these sources in an effective manner and did not take away from their own ethos. Experimentation in these inquiries is the driving force behind their findings. Both authors harbor their realizations and new knowledge in personal experience and narrative. This is especially true in the essay about “Reaching Beyond Hell” because this author uses personal experience more than the other author. The author of the sleep essay uses more sources than the author of the Hell essay uses though and holds a stronger approach to the essay. Both essays were effective in creating a testable experiment for the question to be built upon. The sleep essay could have followed in the path of the Hell essay in using a comparison in the test to help show just how effective the findings are. The Hell essay compared the will to perform individually to the will to perform in a group, which made a clear distinction in the data. The sleep essay compared the school sleep schedule to the spring break sleep schedule, but perhaps the author could have looked into other people’s schedules as well. By using one person as the representation of the entire population, the results can be skewed very far away from the actual representation. In this case, I think the author was still successful because they were representing a narrow group of college students in the US rather than the entire population that sleeps. That level of personality can also keep the audience in mind as well.