Preface Draft

For me this class was a way of tightening my writing and getting some really good feedback from Prof. Bolaski as well as my colleagues. My process to writing is very fine tuned as I have written a lot on my own in the past (including a few movie scripts, essays, and letters). I usually have a pretty good idea of where I want to go with a writing before I even start, usually this applies for things I don't even know a whole lot about (as I will always do some preliminary research before I even decide on a topic, if I don't have previous knowledge). This usually always means that I don't write down any brainstorming, outline, or anything else of this sort, as I do it all in my head. However, because of this, I tend to not ever be happy with my first draft, and almost always do a thorough edit. So far it has worked out fairly well, of course Prof. Bolaski is far more critical of my actual writing than my history professors have been. As far as I am concerned everything I have ever written is unfinished, I am rarely completely happy with a work of mine.
Starting out with the Rhetorical Analysis I have always felt that I can open and close a paper very effectively and so I really wanted to focus on the body of the paper. Of course the whole lesson of the rhetorical analysis was very enlightening and I really enjoyed it. My paper on the article "A Toke and a Tax" by Jeremy Singer-Vine was very effective in breaking down the writers argument that no matter what we do with cannabis the best thing to do is to legalize and tax it. When I started this I thought it would be extremely hard to write, but it actually turned out to be the easiest paper that I wrote for this class.
The second paper I wrote was the Argument Response paper, which I wrote on "The Murder of Dr. Tiller" by Cristina Page. This paper was probably the one I was least happy with when I turned it in, but was also the one that got workshopped by my peers. I received a ton of great advice from this, and this paper is now one of my better ones in this portfolio. Again in this paper I really wanted to work on developing the body of the paper, and I believe that I did very good in this area (especially after the critiquing). One thing which I had always realized but never had told to me was my "wordiness" which I have to keep in check, as it will frequently get out of control.
For my Position paper I chose to get hard on myself and go ahead and chose something that I didn't have a lot of knowledge of or really a strong opinion either way (which is rare for me as I always have a strong opinion). However while researching my subject which was using some other means other than a car for commuting, I started to develop a strong opinion. This really helped me with my paper, also because of my limited knowledge about the subject I really had to work on things such as metacommentary in this paper. Despite all this, it turned out to be my second best paper and by the end of it I was probably most happy with it (of course since I don't have it back yet we will see if that changes when it gets graded).
The Literature Review (Research) was definitely my best paper, and the one I had the most fun doing. After giving myself a challenge for paper three I was going to pick something easy for me to do for the fourth, and so I went with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Synthesizing history is for me something that is incredibly fun (and I hope it is as I plan to be a history teacher) and so this was a very good practice for that.
Looking over all my papers that I really achieved my goal of writing better bodies to papers. Also I did very good with keeping my page numbers down, as this is another frequent problem of mine, I really wanted to stay in the allotted page numbers. All in all I am very happy with how this class went and my progress.