William Summitt

INTRODUCTION ESSAY
I have always struggled as a writer. My senior year of high school I had an amazing AP English teacher and I thought I learned a lot, and improved dramatically. However, upon entering college I realized still how sub par my writing skills were. Over the course of the year I have completed WRIT 1122, where I learned how to properly form an argument and appeal to certain audiences among other things. I am now nearing the final days of the quarter and thus the final days of my WRIT 1133 course. While nearing the end we are instructed to review literature we produced and reflect upon this. To accomplish this I am analyzing the first two papers from this course amongst a piece of writing from another course that will compliment my stance on my academic advancement in the form of writing.
WRIT 1133 is one of two introductory writing courses and specifically focuses on more researched based papers. The first two papers we constructed for this course were in fact researched based, however they differ in where the research is derived from.
The first paper was an interpretive essay in which we derived an argument from previously published sources. In other words we found scholarly documents in the form of books, published online articles, and so on and so forth. My topic for this paper was marijuana. With this paper I wanted to find out the facts on why it is illegal and the arguments on why it should be legalized and from this form a conclusion of my standpoint on the matter. While researching this I was able to find a lot of books of which the majority demonstrated the positive aspects of marijuana, whereas most of my online sources were medical based and argued the negative effects of the drug. Through my research I found a lot of controversial medical opinions. This was one set back to my paper, the topic. It was hard to find solid facts, because this is a topic with rising popularity but relatively little research. The other difficulty with this request was time. To conduct full research on a topic, write a paper and then revise that paper numerous times takes a lot of time and effort. We were given roughly two weeks and we are students with other activities and assignments on our plates.

The second assignment for the quarter was another research project, only this time we conducted our own research. We were supposed to focus on something related to Denver, conduct our own research, and then format our paper similar to a lab write-up. By this I mean an Inro, Method, Response and Conclusion. My project was on the DU food service. I chose this topic because it was realistic. We had another two weeks to conduct research for this paper and then devise the paper itself. To be realistic with time I had to begin collecting data immediately and also focus on a narrow, local audience. By doing this I was able to make my data more accurate. Collecting data was an important thing to consider from the start of this paper. I needed a way to collect data quickly and effectively. My approach was sending surveys to peers of mine through Facebook. I chose to use Facebook because it is such a popular form of media for college students. The other form of collection that I used was simple observation. From this information I concluded that students at the University of Denver were unsatisfied with their provided food service and formed a possible solution to the issue.
I have always hated revising, and for the first paper I was lazy enough to only revise about twice, which is not even the bare minimum for writing of my caliber. Through this course I found through lots of critique from both peers and professors that revision is the only way to meet near perfection and achieve an acceptable grade by my standards. This means formatting a paper prior to writing, make a rough draft, and then revise it twice myself. After this it I found it helpful to get an outside opinion, so I turned to a friend and asked that they revise my writing. At this point I would then revise again and if I had time refer to the writing center. I think by learning this approach this quarter my writing has again improved dramatically. I know that I am not a skilled enough writer to appreciate a first draft as a final one. It was a painful piece of information, but in the long run a helpful one that I can attribute to this writing program, and a strict grading system holding me to a higher standard.