My Kozol Paper

Overall, I thought that I did a good job constructing my paper as to best communicate my argument. I believe that my paper’s main strengths were the connections that I made between my argument and Kozol’s actual text. I believe that I was extremely accurate in my connections and that if this was truly an argument for Kozol’s piece to remain in the Humanities Base Text that with some fine tuning this would be a well constructed argument. The fine tuning would lie within one of my paper’s weaknesses, my use of grammar. Grammar has always been a struggle for me when writing, and I would like believe that I am finally overcoming it with a little more work. Another weakness that my paper had was in my MLA citations. My citations of Kozol’s piece were incorrect. However, after a question was posed in class about how to cite his piece, since it was not his actual book that we were citing, I was under the impression that we were to cite as though it was from the Humanities Base Text and not from Kozol’s actual book. Yet, ultimately comments were made on my paper about it, which has cause a little bit of confusion for me. In addition, another weakness my paper had was the way that I used my second source in my paper. I do believe that if I had worked with my outside source more, I could have created a stronger argument. But, in my defense, my thought at the time was that Kozol’s work was strong enough to create a solid argument without the addition of the second outside source. Also, the addition of the outside source was also difficult for me to include. When I was trying to put it in, I found that my argument did not flow as well as it did without it. Thus, for the purpose of fluidity, I did not elaborate more on it. Also, another difficulty that I had in my paper was knowing when to use a block quote. In the past I was always told the rule of thumb was to block a quote if it was longer than four lines, and it seems through comments on my paper that I should have used block quotes when they were exactly four lines. Furthermore, this was my first argumentative paper and I think that for my first argumentative paper, I did exceptionally well. Also, I look forward to writing more argumentative papers in the future for English 102.