We are now half way through the year in Age of Exploration and we have covered many topics and researched many interesting and important parts of history. For this project we were told we must write a bibliographic essay on an important person in the 1600’s. I was not yet familiar with the idea of a bibliographic essay but I wanted to learn more about this style of writing. I chose Louis XIV as my person of interest and not surprisingly there were many resources available on him.
As I dove into the many books on Louis XIV I found many reoccurring sources telling of his hypocrisy and self absorbed mannerisms. I thought of King Louis originally as a great king who ruled his country with dignity, but soon found out this was not the case. The books described the money and time it took for the construction of Versailles, a palace which Louis constructed for his own enjoyment. Instead of tending to the needs of his subjects, Louis spent his time tending to his own needs and investing time trying to make his image more powerful. While doing so he actually accomplished the opposite of what he intended, causing the French to see him as more of an average person than the god-like figure he was originally posed as.
This project gave me a different view on research and essays and how to construct an essay. I discovered that by writing a bibliographic essay you learn much about Louis XIV from many different points of view and during the process I got to make my own decisions from comparing reliable sources and finding information which best fit together to describe him. I found that, although difficult to write, a bibliographic essay is a great option to finding information on a topic, it let me understand my topic better and see all the different sides of the big topic. I would recommend a bibliographic essay to anyone needing to find out information on a big topic with many different aspects and resources associated with it. This project was a great learning experience and gave me a new approach when learning. So far in this class, I have learned much about my own writing style and what style I prefer to write in and what style I am best at writing. Age of Ex lets me explore my own writing techniques and all of the different ways there are out there to write about a topic. There is not just one standard essay format that everyone follows, in fact there are many different styles that work for a variety of projects. I think that a bibliographic essay was a great choice for a big topic such as King Louis XIV, and I learned about myself as a writer during this process. I look forward to a great second semester of learning about myself as a learner, researcher, writer.
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Sources:
The Age of Exploration Blog 
J Tworek
January 20, 2012
I really appreciated reading your blog posting. You have a strong sense of the written word. Your word choice and sentence composition is strong. Well done!
Maybe you’ll post a follow up blog entry, when your essay is done? Or maybe contribute to the Wikipedia page on Louis XIV, if you have strong and valid references to support your inclusions.
Heather Nadolny (@hnadolny)
January 20, 2012
Louis XIV was quite the personality, and I think you’ve certainly discovered that! Great job using a variety of sources, especially books, which can have so much more to delve into than the average website/Wikipedia page. You could also have ample material to write a very good opinion paper/blog post about the use/misuse of power, starting with him. Keep up the good work. 🙂
Maya
April 30, 2012
Hello! Your blog post really persuaded me to consider a bibliographic essay as a good way of writing for school next time I get to choose. I studied Louis XIV in my Cultures class, and I was surprised about how little he cared for his subjects. I was wondering, does a bibliographic essay mean that the essay only consists of your sources?
andrea1001
April 30, 2012
Im glad! The bibliographic essay not only consists of sources, but of what each of those sources provide in terms of information on your topic. It is important to talk both about your sources and the information each has to sufficiently complete a bibliographic essay. Thanks for your comment!