The writing problem presented while constructing ‘Choosing Truth’, my research based argumentative essay, came from the research itself.  While I may have had difficulty in focusing my topic to a narrower subject that was easily solved by highlighting my thesis so that it was easy to reference while I worked, the largest difficulty came from incorporating the research into a focused point in support of my overall argument.  Each source I drew from really helped in crafting my overall understanding of the issue and the broad arguments reinforced my conception of my argument, in that they were quite useful, where the difficulty arose was incorporating direct quotes or limiting myself to a range of pages from which I drew an idea.  The problem with that is that I felt my small portions didn’t match perfectly with the idea I had in mind, and I wanted to draw ideas expressed in multiple places into one spot on the page which was hard to do with citations.  What I tried to do to fix this, is mixing broad references with more direct passages.  Most notably with Descartes and then Steele, respectively.  This is because Descartes kind of rambles in his meditations, each paragraph has its own purpose and “conclusion”, but his overall conclusion has to be more derived from weighing the individual arguments he makes, reading ‘Meditations’ is like reading a conversation you would have in your own head, it isn’t formatted like a formal essay.  Steele on the other hand uses his documentary style to bounce between context and discussion and will end each portion of those with a quick aside, summing up his analysis into a quick understandable “nugget”.  I think that on my next works I will try to do this in a more deliberate manner, which will make it a more effective writing tactic and improve my overall writing.