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.

Writing this essay I found that by looking back through this semester’s work brought me to a much better understanding of myself.  Through the introspection and analysis of past developments while writing essays and the new understanding of my logical process as an approach to writing I was able to draw out the patterns of my development and see what I was as a writer.   My use of logical processes in analyzing initial material, my mental scaffolding I create for writing, and pattern recognition are what make my writing distinct, and their acknowledgement make my writing good.  Unlike previous essays I found this one much easier to write, instead of struggling to get the proverbial ball rolling I had the great starting point of my previous work.  Likewise, the exercises and writing that lead up to this essay had already formed a framework for the writing in my mind.  What I found to be genuinely difficult about writing this essay was quite different from the previously encountered problems of writing, many of which I discussed overcoming in my essay, it was caused more by trying to connect my own ideas with one another into a single cohesive and fluid argument than the external regulations of my previous difficulties.  While the same strategies and characteristics of logical writing I discussed provided some alleviation to the problem the real solution to the issue came in the rather simple practice of editing by reading aloud.  This tactic may be rudimentary, but it allowed me to see the patterns between the issues I was discussing and create a natural flow from one idea to the next, something that I had struggled with earlier in the semester and year.

With this essay I found it to be rather easy to construct a thesis and organize my argument, compared to the previous two essays which were far less objective and focused on personal experience and ideas.  However, it was much harder to work through the material for this essay and deliver it to the audience while still balancing the Rhetorical analysis between both the academic journal and the magazine article.  The dense material was hard to sort through for relevant information at times, but after stepping back and evaluating the rhetorical framework of each article along with the purpose of writing this essay I was able to penetrate the text by looking for patterns rather than the information inside of the material itself.  Another problem I encountered while writing this essay was similar to the first, in that the difference between the amount of material in the journal, nine dense pages with graphs and charts to boot, was so much greater than the magazine article, two pages with larger font, that I struggled to find parallels between the two at times.  The solution to this problem was to find what did I find easier about the short magazine entry and then to look for opposites in the journal.  While writing this essay my perception of journalism changed, by rhetorically comparing the two articles and finding the deliberate decisions made by journalist Dina Fine Maron I saw the importance and art of journalism, as it translates topics I can hardly understand into something that I find interesting and can fully comprehend.  This also led to the introduction between my self and a new idea about authorship, while writing this I realized that we can’t know anything outside of our own experience except through translation, whether that be by spoken or written word, or even visual, and the author of that translation guides the narrative and content both consciously and unconsciously.

Writing this essay was much easier for me than the first essay.  I found it much more catered toward my cognition to talk about the ways that discourse communities interact and assimilate with individuals from other communities.  While it was easier to find my ‘groove’ and begin writing this essay, I found that the complexity and depth of the topic made it much harder to write a well-balanced essay.  Juggling the different criteria and thresholds while also keeping it related to my personal experience and what I had to say about each community in general.  Writing the essay proved difficult in the grammar because of the mixed time frames I presented, forcing me to say things like “we weren’t appreciated” and follow it with “because we aren’t locals”, a confusing mix.  Writing about my personal experience was difficult as well because  at times I can run away on a tangent that I find interesting but would need far too much explanation to be relevant to the on-hand topic, because only I know the full story and range of connections.  I found while writing this that my understanding of my community and the clashing values of the communities I entered became much more apparent to me, allowing me to understand why certain things happened the way they did.  I now think about communities and regions in a whole new light, seeing less of the façade of character each community presents, but instead a deeper look at their values through interaction.  It has been really neat to see this new viewpoint while here at VMI especially, where the Rat Line, ROTC’s, and different classes all display different characters and values unique to them within the greater VMI discourse community.

Writing about my literacy narrative was hard.  I find that writing about myself can be difficult much of the time.  When I tell someone about quick overview of who I am and what to expect of me.  However, myself it is easy to simply layout a series of facts, real life events and occurrences, that provide a go deeper and discuss what makes me tick, what drives me, or what in my life has made me who I am, and it gets really difficult.  I think that is because I don’t know all the answers myself but writing this has led me to better understand some of those things.  On the diction side, I found it hard to keep the essay itself in a formal enough tone to still be easy to read and follow the ideas I was discussing, and to maintain my personality, but through a bit of revision it cleared up rather easily.  I was also, and still am frankly, not used to the first-person form of writing, it encompasses the struggles I already mentioned above, but it also presents difficulties in regard to tense and diction.  I believe that I passed much of the difficulty by working exclusively in paragraphs to tell a specific part of my narrative, and then brought them together and gave the whole work a read through, adjusting and adding transitions to make it flow in a good manner.  My intent when writing the literacy essay was to discuss, and discover, the different events and individuals that crafted the man I have become today and will continue craft my future.  While writing it I definitely saw events in my life in a new light, not as simple facts, but as highly momentous occasions, completing my personal goal as well as the assignment.