Jennessa Lever Introductory Essay Rough Draft

For the text-based research paper, the first we wrote in WRIT 1133, as a class we were instructed to write about an issue taking place in Colorado. The assignment was designed for us to use scholarly text sources to obtain information and then present the information in a way that would be useful and interesting for the reader. For this piece I decided to right about the Gay Rights movement in Colorado. At the time, there were several articles from every point of view in the news. These were both helpful and informative. While writing the paper I was able to delve into the issues of Gay Rights in Colorado and see how they were different from the views of other places in the country particularly in New England, where currently, the majority of the states give full marriage rights to Gay Couples.

The Second paper we were instructed to write in this particular class was one of Qualitative Information. This information was to be gathered by the author, and presented in a way that informed the reader. This paper had to be focused on an issue within the DU community. For this particular project I chose to focus on the issue of Greek Life on campus. I was curious to see what participant’s opinions were about their future, and how it would be influenced by their Greek experience in college. Although I received a small number of responses, I was still able to use complimentary research to interpret the responses I did receive and come to an overall conclusion while writing the paper. This topic was of particular interest to myself because I have been considering joining Greek Life. These considerations compelled me to look farther into what Greek Life can do for me after college.

My first research paper in college was written for a class titled, “Introduction to Politics: Power and Justice.” We referenced a particular website and looked into how certain regions of the world trust one another. We looked into different correlations in the survey results from the website and drew conclusions based on the information we received solely from the website, and class materials. This essay went well for me, I received a fantastic grade, and also received good feedback. This however, was not a writing class, and thus the writing style and grading style of the class and its professor was different. They were looking for my understanding of the knowledge I had obtained in the class and how I related that into the writing, whereas in this particular writing class the students are being graded on how well they write and present the ideas, not so much the understanding of the topics being discussed in the paper.