Argumentative Analysis

After getting back my grade from my argumentative paper, I felt like the grade reflected my effort in writing this paper. I was excited to get into researching Kozol and the city of East St. Louis in what people think about the city and the reasons for it being in the condition it is in. With papers that are about an interesting topic, it makes me feel like I can write the paper easier. I felt like I had lot of strengths and few weaknesses that came with some of the problems that I came across when writing it.

Throughout the paper, I experienced a lot of strengths and weaknesses that could be worked upon for the next paper. A lot of the strengths started with the creation of my thesis. I knew that Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities” was a great read and very educational so there was no way that the University of Dayton English Department should take it out of the Humanities Based Text. There were educational and environmental problems that were explained by Kozol to be the reason for the condition of East St. Louis. So much awareness was brought from reading this story and doing some further research. When I discussed the educational problems, I was fortunate enough to find a great website with information pertaining to the educational dilemmas in East St. Louis. It was almost a weakness that there was so much helpful information because I started to state too much quotes and statistics instead of using one and expanding on that. There was great wording in both resources that helped me a lot when writing this. I think that if I didn’t find the right sources, it would’ve been a lot harder to describe the awareness it brings and importance of this book. When it came to citing of these sources, I had problems figuring out what got used, especially for Kozol’s. Another weakness I had when using the outside source was adding the title of the document; I covered the book in the introduction, but when I just use an article for one example, it’s hard to remember to add the name of the article. Overall, I believe that my paragraphs had great information from both sources and using the right amount of information and backing it up with my own observations to why it helps the greatness of the story.

When it came to the comments, I agree with them all. Most of the marginal comments just said to check the citation rules. I wasn’t sure what to do with a story within a book. At first I had one way, and then changed it to another one. In other comments, I believe that they were all fair; at times I forgot to expand on some thoughts. I quoted too much at times since there was so much information that could be used to help out the saving of Kozol’s story. There were times where I could’ve expanded and used my own words to explain why Kozol wrote a successful story to bring about awareness to the rest of the world about East St. Louis. Towards the end, the final comments were a basic overall comment of the marginal comments. I agree that I used a good amount of quotes and points to the awareness Kozol brings and that I need to check the citation and quoting rules throughout the essay. There is a lot that I believe that I did successfully, and fortunate enough to have weaknesses that could easily be alter and make into strengths.