Birth of a Tolerable Writer

This class has taught me many important lessons. However one of the most important lessons being that revision is never done. Throughout the majority of high school I’ve been taught to write as much as possible, in order to appease a word requirement quota. Ever since then I have been a repeat offender of writing with quantity instead of quality in mind. This class has taught me to revise my writing and prove my point in the minimal amount of sentences. My first Money Rewrite was long winded and the points were all over the place. However the rewrite accomplishes more with less words. Also, I feel as if my Rebuttal argument and revision of my Causal argument addresses problems that were pointed out by the professor.

I’ve always known that reading was important, but I never really comprehended the importance of accurate reading. When reading and paying attention to visual arguments in this class, I’ve learned to think more critically. Now I am able to be more visual in my readings and identify the arguments quicker than I was able to before.  This course has also taught me that no argument is ever one dimensional. There are multiple sides to every case. For example, when I first heard of Belgium allowing children to request voluntary euthanasia, I immediately thought “Oh, this is wrong, without a doubt.” After more research though, I came to think about both sides of the topic and eventually tuned in favor for voluntary child euthanasia. Now it is my research paper topic.

As Mr.Hodges has told me in my wirings, don’t beat around the Bush. Don’t try to build up suspense by withholding information. Instead just identify what you’re going to be focusing on throughout your paper. Information is detrimental to our kind of writing, and withholding for any reason only weakens our writing. Additionally, it’s required that you write about a topic extensively only after familiarizing yourself with it. I’ve learned to look at multiple sides of an argument and come up with my own conclusions, which would have been impossible if I haven’t learned to take information so seriously.

When it comes to ethical writing, I believe I understand a part of it. We are in an academic setting, so trying to complete an assignment in an unethical way is grounds for immediate punishment. But even if you someone knows they can get away with it, unethical writing is not worth it. It defeats the purpose these writing assignments in the first place, which exist to challenge us to think outside the box. I have always known this. However ethical writing also refers to being responsible. I have had careless mistakes, where I identified a statement in my text as a quote, but didn’t cite the source in the following or previous sentences. I just left the it up to the reader to find it at the end of the paper in the bibliography. This is lazy and irresponsible, as not only did I fail to provide important information at an opportune time, but I also lowered the credibility of my own paper. Writing ethically isn’t only about doing your own work and not plagiarizing, but it is also about making sure that you try your best to appropriately inform the reader.