Research paper

Overall this research paper has been more of a chore than learning experience for me. It didn’t do much that in class fight clubs, or other assignments didn’t. Learning to properly construct an argument and do research for that argument is important, but I feel like I spent more time just trying to meet the requirements than actually thinking about what I was doing. If I were to do something like this again I would prefer to just have some subject assigned to write about. Having to come up with one myself led to me wasting a lot of time trying to arbitrarily choose one. Having a specific one assigned could have also removed the home-town focus, which I did not find very helpful or useful. Knowing what audience you are writing for is important, but this particular audience just added difficulty instead of direction as there is not anything particularly special about my hometown for me to incorporate. Additionally, although annotated bibliographies can be useful, I would prefer it if annotations were not required as most of the time when I was searching my sources for material to use I just went to the actual source anyway. I also think the length requirements for each individual annotation were a bit excessive.  The in class essay was probably the most useful thing we did because it gave us a chance to practice just the basic skill of constructing an argument without many of the distractions that come into play with other assignments. So overall the process of writing this paper may have slightly improved my writing, but not drastically. As for Strunk and White, there were plenty of other resources available for reference and I found them to be more helpful.