Semester in Summary

Looking back at all of the concepts that we learned this semester in ENWR, I have learned a lot about how to construct a firm argument. Before taking this class, I believed that I had a good understanding of how to write a good paper. However, this class has helped me to solidify the formula to creating an argument that a reader will follow and, hopefully, agree with.
When I looked at the syllabus at the beginning of the year, I anticipated the easiest concept to be creating claims, However, in reality, I did not fully understand all of the components that are required in creating a good claim. With the examples from my first set of claims, it is clear that they were just statements of fact and they lacked complexity and contestability.
On the other hand, I thought the hardest principles would be creating problem statements and acknowledging and responding to other's arguments. In reality, acknowledgement and response came quite naturally to me. When looking through my drafts, I had included A/R without even realizing it. Macro A/R was a bit more challenging to include, but with a little brainstorming, it did not take me long to come up with a response to major counter-arguments to my claim. In retrospect, I actually think that this was probably the easiest concept for me to grasp because I did so without even realizing it. I was correct at the beginning of the semester when I anticipated that creating problem statements would be difficult for me to grasp. When writing my first paper using this concept, I really struggled to arrange my thoughts in the way that problem statements required. However, I found that if I simply wrote an introduction as I would before learning this concept, I could then organized it in a way that it followed the template of a problem statement. This was definitely the hardest concept for me to fully grasp and implement effectively in a paper.