Benedetti, Portfolio Introduction Draft

I have definitely been strengthened as a reader and a writer through my 1133 Writing course here at DU. Three researched-based assignments have helped me learn how to conduct research in an ethical fashion and have taught me how to self-review all of my work. I have never taken a writing class that focused mainly on research, so this class was very beneficial in teaching me how to define my researching skills and helped me create some interesting topics.

For the first assignment, the text-based research paper, I chose to focus on a topic that interests me: sex trafficking in the city and surrounding areas of Denver. The purpose of this assignment was to create a research question to write about and to discuss both sides of the argument and eventually come up with a clearly-stated argument. I used various research instruments including the online library sources and magazine articles to come up with my information. Since I feel very strongly about this topic, it was fairly easy to come up with a clear and well-organized argument. This helped me learn how to use texts for research, like books, websites and other texts. With so many forms of information it is rather difficult to find and gather relevant information about a certain topic, so this assignment was very helpful in that sense.

The second paper we were assigned was the hardest for me out of all three. The qualitative research paper was designed to gather qualitative research around the DU campus in order to answer a question that interests us. Instruments such as surveys, interviews and people-watching were all options for us. For this assignment I chose to answer the question "Is there a direct correlation between a students happiness with DU and their amount of school spirit?" Simply, is a happier student more inclined to sport DU attire than a student who is less content with the school? In order to answer this question, I primarily used people-watching to come up with a percentage of people who were wearing DU attire. After this, I asked random students to be honest in answering how content they were with the school, and if there is anything they would change. This was definitely the hardest and most time-consuming assignment out of them all, but all of the information that was collected provided a strong research argument.

The third project, Mapping the Local, was my favorite project out of the three. Since it was a group project, it was easy to divide up all the work and put it together in the end, instead of having to do everything individually. Our group decided to create a Google Map, illustrating some of our favorite restaurants around Denver. Our basic question was "What makes restaurants popular?" We went to a variety of different restaurants of all kinds of cuisines and gathered information about the atmosphere, the food, the decor and the happiness of the customers. We conducted interviews at each restaurant and asked why they enjoyed (or did not enjoy) the restaurant. In the end, we compiled all of our information and made a map which included reviews, interviews and photos. It was fun working with a group. I find group projects much easier than individual assignments.

All of the in-class work and process notes definitely helped me to better organize my writing and focus on my weaknesses as a writer. Process notes allowed me to carefully articulate all aspects of my writing and allowed me to notice flaws that I would not have noticed otherwise. The in-class revisions were also particularly helpful because peers tend to have a different take on a certain paper, and their insight is almost always constructive. A great weakness that I have as a writer is being able to organize my thoughts into concise paragraphs to create an argument. This has always been a burden on my writing abilities and I am very glad I got to improve this through the Writing 1133 course.