Old Version: Click here to download Major Assignment 1.docx

New Version: Click here to download Major Assignment 1 (Revised).docx

My strengths from high school lay in research papers, because I had a lot of experience with them in my history classes in particular. I found this assignment easier to write and revise compared to Major Assignment 2, so I chose this one because I thought it reflected my strengths better, and I could do more intense and structured revision. I ended up adding three pages in my revision. I also chose this assignment as a foil to Short Assignment 3, where I analyzed how other authors used rhetorical strategies to convince an audience, because in this one I employed these strategies myself. In a way these 2 assignments reflect my journey of learning Outcome 1, which was definitely my weakest one coming into this class.

This assignment is perhaps the most directly related to Outcome 2, which is essentially how to integrate evidence so it supports a claim. The effectiveness of a paper lies almost entirely on its evidence, and how well the evidence helps to convince the reader. A good paper has evidence that flows with the writing and isn’t too lengthy, which can distract the reader. The evidence needs to be from multiple sources to support the appeal to ethos and provide a well-rounded argument. The strength of your evidence matters for good writing because it is the foundation—it supports the claim and everything else. I demonstrated use of good evidence by using sources that had positive, negative, and neutral views of George Gey, so I didn’t bias myself from the beginning. Sources such as Skloot were more negative, so I used those for the takedown, while Gale Biography was more positive for the talk up. This assignment helped me to learn how to use the resources available to me as a UW student, and it eased me into using university-level pieces of evidence, such as Gale Biography, which I had some experience with in high school but not a lot. This improved my writing because I had more complex, peer-reviewed sources that were more reliable, and I gained experience using these higher-level sources. I didn’t revise too much in regards to this outcome because I already had a good amount of sources, but I was able to fold in more information with the revision, and thinking about this outcome allowed to streamline my integration of evidence.

Outcome 4 was another outcome that I displayed heavily in this assignment. After all, I added three whole pages after my revision, and those words had to come from somewhere. Proofreading and revision are extremely important for writing, because it ensures that your argument is succinct yet well-supported and readable by your audience. My revision tends to focus on ensuring readability—I like to focus on the flow of my piece, and I believe that every word and your choice of words can affect how someone reads your paper. For example, I changed the sentence “Inside his lab, he upheld the make-do attitude of his youth and cobbled together much of his equipment from an agglomeration of microscope parts, glass, and metal scraps, along with abandoned motors from a nearby junkyard, stitching together groundbreaking machines from the castoffs of unwanted trash.” By choosing to use stronger words such as “groundbreaking” and “castoff,” I appealed to the reader’s pathos and created sympathy for Gey. I did this throughout the talk up as well as takedown section, where expanded the slaughterhouse scene to strike terror into the reader’s heart and create distance between the reader and Gey. I also expanded my counterarguments in the talk up, such as “Without excusing the racism and lack of knowledge of the time, it is a fact that taking samples from a patient without permission and not informing Lacks’ family after the widespread use of HeLa cells were all commonplace and most importantly acceptable practices in Geroge’s time,” in which I countered the belief (that the reader likely came in, due to Skloot’s bestseller) with that Gey was racist because he didn’t inform the Lacks family. Countering these common beliefs allowed my argument to be stronger while still being supported. In terms of feedback, I was told that I could play with voice more in the talk up, so I did. Talk ups have to be more subtle than takedowns, but I chose to change every time I referred to George Gey from Gey to George to bring a more personal and close feeling to him. I also chose to further expand on his difficult childhood to create sympathy for him, and to write more about how he dedicated even his body to science in order to display his selflessness. Additionally, I bolstered by conclusions by adding a couple sentences, so they could be more encompassing and end the sections with a stronger intensity, ensuring that the paper came full circle and left the reader with a robust impression. By using Outcome 4, I was able to increase the strength of my argument and assure that the reader would leave with a memorable, well-organized opinion.