THE PITCH!! WHAT I HAVE LEARNED!!

The pitch: What have I learned this semester about writing and/or argument? Well, I have learned and re-learned several things like how to include sources into essays, how to present arguments as introductory ideas when referring to a specific source, how to write a correct summary of a source, how to give a little background about the author when introducing his/her first quote in an essay, how to give the reader a heads-up when a quote is about to appear (a signal phrase), how to cite a specific source properly, how to keep the flow of logic and coherence between paragraphs and make the whole essay more like an interlocking web where all ideas have relevancy to one another instead of doing the typical “stack” of paragraphs. I also had the opportunity to review the different types of logical fallacies there are and to extend my knowledge to a few other fallacies I did not know about. By enforcing the summary and analysis writing (reliance on the sources), I think I’ve become a little better writer and now I feel more fluent and confident when actually incorporating the summary and analysis portion on any essay I need to write.

For the portfolio revision of any of the essays written throughout the semester, I have decided to do it for essay #1, which is about the balance I consider schools and parents should have about competition and competitive sports and games during children’s growth and development. I decided to revise this essay because it is the only essay that I wrote where I only included 1 source, and plus, it was from the Elements of Argument text book. So I want to include more and better sources to it to have a better sense of credibility as well as more support for my ideas and maybe other ideas I might want to use as support for my claim from those new sources. I also decided to revise that specific essay because it is the shortest I wrote throughout the semester, and I thought it would be very good to add more relevant information to that one instead of maybe considering another essay that already has enough information from more sources.

The ideas that I have are basically reading more about the topic and getting more support from more credible sources to back up my arguments. I will be using sources from the MLA Project #2 which will be website sources and I will consider any previous suggestions from Jason to improve my paper :)