Self Assessment

1. There have been many instances in this course where I have had to make a clear argument and follow statements made with explicit support. The paper that exemplified this practice was the last paper I wrote, research paper: “SAT scores”. The sole purpose of this paper was to make a legitimate argument and conduct research to support the argument. The argument I made was that “Though the SATs are an easy way to make quick admittance decisions it should not be the foundation for college admittance because they are innately flawed”. This argument was followed by three explicit reasons as to why the SAT should not be used as the main detriment of college admittance. One reason that supported my argument was that “[t]he widespread content biases are largely “prevalent in vocabulary words and essay topics” (“Standardized Tests”). This paper was very effective in showing the ability to make a claim to argument and fully supporting said claim with facts and statistics to influence the intended audience.

2. My first paper in this course, “We Need a Higher Quality Outrage” which is a summary of Deborah Tannen;s article of the same title. In this paper I had to choose my vocabulary very carefully. I had to do this because I did not want to plagiarize any of Tannen’s work. My vocabulary usage can be seen in the first sentence where I summarize the point Tannen’s article without plagiarizing, ‘Tannen argues in this article about how “agonism” a “ritualized opposition,” obscures real opposition in the general population’. This sentence was imperative and required the usage of vocabulary that described Tannen’s point, that was short, and that was not plagiarized. I also had to accurately accredited Tannen’s actual words by putting them in ...

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...l. Our teacher emphasized the importance of developing a convincing argument throughout the course because of it is a valuable skill in the workforce. There was no particular issue with developing this skill but there was a particular process for developing a concise argument. One of the first steps to develop a concise argument is to develop a well throughout complex sentence thesis. This way you can introduce your main idea and argument. The following steps all branch off of the thesis. After the thesis having straight forward topic sentences for all the main points you are making is very important. The topic sentences are followed by supporting facts and conclusion. This process makes a very concise argument and thesis. I think this is the most important thing that I have learned about writing this semester that will help me throughout my college and career life.