Mentor Text

“Consider the Lobster” is the example piece for project 2 and I understand why. This article speaks of a personal experience that the community of lobster enthusiast in Maine understand, with the purpose of informing others on the lobster culture of Maine and the ethics of it. The intended audience may be people who are considering attending the next Maine Lobster Festival. This would lead me to imply that the author is trying to make people reconsider the ethics of the eating animals. The Maine Lobster Festival is simply used as an example. The piece also utilizes a substantial amount of facts/research to confirm the points being made. Using this as a model for project 2, I now have a new understanding of what I can do. This article uses footnotes in a way that I had not previously considered; I have only ever used them for citations or definitions. Honestly, I usually skip over them when reading, but in this piece they have substantial meaning to the composition. On the other hand, what confuses me is that the footnotes are not used to cite. There is actually very minimal citations throughout the article considering the amount of information provided. I also noticed that the page numbers skip around so that may play a part in the lack of citing. Also, a good amount of the information used came from personal knowledge or experiences from the Maine Lobster Festival. I think that it is easy to forget all of the resources that we already have gained through life while writing a research paper. I now have more to consider while working on project 2 after reading “Consider the Lobster.”