Reflective Essay: How To Improve Your Claims

In writing a research paper it’s important to make sure your sources are valid and will help strengthen your claim. To have a persuasive paper and grab the reader’s attention towards the issue you are addressing you need to show readers that you as the writer are giving them valuable and trustworthy information. To do this you need evidence that will help the audience understand the scope of the issue whether it be by using statistics or data in the form of percentages or a flow chart. Sometimes finding sources can become complicated because the topic chosen might be either too broad or too narrow, so when you set out to search for sources your unable to find valuable information. Moreover, it’s important to provide yourself with time when …show more content…
When the deadline for an assignment was nearing, I made sure that everyone was aware and double-checked that each group member had their part finished. During the Annotated Bibliography paper, I reviewed my group member’s sources to see if they would work with our central idea and provide effective evidence to support our claims. If someone had questions about the assignment or needed help with finding valid sources I would help them look up some sources that could support their ideas. I have everyone post the part of the assignment two days prior to the deadline that way I could fix up the format of the paper such as fixing the margin and the font. This also gave group member additional time to make last-minute changes before I submitted the paper. When it came to the research paper I suggested that we all post in order of the section we were doing so the group member who was assigned the introduction and background would post their part first. Having already posted the introduction and background the person in charge of writing the first body paragraph could easily connect their ideas and incorporate the background into their part this goes for the rest of the body paragraphs as well. It helped our paper flow and we were able to stay on the topic of how the War on Drugs and incarceration affect the lives of American …show more content…
After reading our course book I was able to get information on the topic, but doing the research myself helped me understand the depth of the issue that the color poor low-income communities are facing. Since I was looking for the information myself rather than having it presented in front of me, I could see the different thoughts on the issue from many perspectives. I read articles about how the war on drugs was good because it helped eliminate “criminals” and other articles that discussed how the war on drugs created ghettos. When doing the research, I tried to keep an open mind and not let my own opinion about the issue influence my research. Moreover, researching about the War on Drugs and incarnation has made me realize that to understand the issues that are impacting our society or anything, it’s helpful to read about it but doing the research yourself if profoundly a different experience. As for my group members, I believe they had a similar experience. In the beginning when we assigned the research project my group members were confused and didn’t understand where exactly to start. They didn’t know much about incarceration rates but had a general idea about the War on Drugs. After finishing the research project, we had enough understanding of the issue to where we could inform our peers of the problem, which we