Looking back

So the semester is pretty much done and i'ts there is no doubt that the class has picked up alot of new skills or improved their already existing skills in writing 101. My goals at the beginning of the semester were most likely to take whatever eloquence I already had and put it on some sort of steroids for writing so to emulate works like that of Christopher Hitchens and Carl Sagan. Also more specifically my goal was to be able to write at a level suitable for an article writer/author. I feel that I've made some progress with these goals and hopefully writing 2 will help out these aspirations. On the essays I've had returned to me I noticed a trend in how I make mistakes. Either they're small spelling errors or some larger error in my focus. In my 7th blog post I mentioned how I didn't feel like I'd grown much as a writer but with more time passed by I can say the semester as a whole give me new abilities and improved my skills.

Portfoliolioliolio

The essay I chose to revise and use for my portfolio is most likely going to be the argument analysis essay. Before I even begin revising that essay I'd need to figure out the details about what I should be editing. The strengths that came from that essay appear in the form of having good insight, awesome vocab, and probably great organization. My weaknesses came from not being as focused as i should be, i needed a better thesis and the paper was just whack in general. To effectively fix my paper i'm going to address each weakness and correct them individually and then take my strong points and put them on literary steroids so to make an A paper into an A+ paper. While I go over each paragraph of the essay i'll make sure that they keep focused and relevant to what the thesis dictated.

Analysis and Learning

I analyzed the article "Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?" by author Charles Murray who in this very article was using an informal tone to convey his message, which would most likely be an attempt at connecting to the reader or making them feel like they're on his level f class or intellect. This tone was very effective, especially being in the New York Times which has a majority of articles written in this manner, it served to help ultimately. The authoritative tone by now has been played out and is most commonly expected by that of a doctor someone who holds a public office or some kind of supervisor etc. This tone didn't really affect my writing of essay 4 because i'd been writing with an informal tone since before it was cool <_< (just putting it out there) What this article did do for me as a writer was give me a new look on using evidence to support claims by checking whether or not the strength and validity of the evidence were up to par with the claim. I really didn't want to have salty evidence like Charles Murray. Overall, i can say that I didn't really extract much from Murray and i'm sure we all know who the superior writer out of the two of us is because of that ;)

blawg 12

I'd be lying if i said that my evidence chart was done correctly or that my argument is completely picked, but i do have an idea on what it could be and what the weakest/strongest pieces of evidence could be. With the thesis probably ending up as "True body builders don't rely on the usage of steroids because of the physically destructive nature and lack of integrity it takes to resort to them."
The strongest evidence i have in this would most likely stem from some sort of science journal but not with data but more of a brief description of the negative reprocussions steroid use has. This would most likely be the strongest argument because nobody likes to challenge a good scientific journal quote. It'd be very hard to avoid any sort of second thought on steroid use after reading that first piece of evidence because there'd be little to no room for interpretation.
The weakest piece of evidence would probably come from my rebuttal touching on the ethical standpoint on steroid use where i go through how one would lack any sort of sportsmanship and integrity to resort to false gaining in the weight room. Some people even advocate the allowance of steroid use as a tool to go from great to greater. It'd be pretty weak because should someone already have resorted to using steroids, who's to say that they even have the capacity to feel guilt for their dishonesty as an athlete? I'm not one for guilt tripping people, but with an argument paper like this i needed to find something to fill up the paper with lol.