When I wrote this paper, I was wondering how was I going to write a 4-5 page paper on a book that I do not like. I was not really interested or excited about the text but I manage to bring issues in my thesis statement through a lot of research in the text and Internet. In this project, I am proud that I was able to formulate a thesis statement that was clear, understandable, and can be argued throughout my essay. Usually I am struggling to make a thesis statement when I am writing a paper, but in this project I had too many ideas bouncing around in my head. My thesis statement could have been a paragraph if I did not put any constraints on my ideas. The difficult part of this project was narrowing my thesis statement because of the many ideas I had. I had wrote so many ideas in my first draft of part 1 that I had to cut things out in order to keep the important things that would help me in aiding in my argument. Another challenging thing about this project was finding evidence from the text to support my argument. Although, I marked up my book and made notes, the language of the text was so off putting, so I had to continually go on SparkNotes to find out where certain information was located in the text and what a certain passage meant.
The skill that I required from doing this project is doing a better thesis statement for my essay. I believe this skill is going to be great in the future when I work in the legal profession because as an attorney you are supposed to formulate arguments in your case. Another skill I required is analyzing and interpreting passages from text. The five-step method from Professor Dever’s was hard to grasp at first but as I wrote my essay, I started to understand the concept behind that methodology. It made me analyze more in the evidence I was using to support my argument; something that I would never do. If I could change any part of my project, I would not change anything. After many revisions, I believe my work product is good and I am confident that it deserves a passing grade. If I could change any part of project #2, I would only include part 2 of the project because I got to be creative and I did not have to formulate a thesis statement in a structured paper. Basically, in part 2 I got to have fun. Lastly, I would consider changing the book and using a different text that is more clear, adventurous, and fun to read, so that students can enjoy writing about a book that they love.
