Noah Mabry

HELA 10 Hour 3
David
15 May, 2016
1984 Argumentative Essay Reflection
Before I started writing this essay, I had a good amount of knowledge about Capital
punishment, mainly because I like to keep up with current debatable topics being discussed
around the world today and I like to have an opinion on debatable topics in the world around me.
To start writing this essay, I collected all of my knowledge over the subject, and discovered
resources that either supports my claim on the controversial topics or articles that I can use to
refute my counterargument. I knew to do this because in the past I took part in creating many
different research projects over my time as student. I felt as if I improved my skills when writing
this kind of paper by implementing rhetorical elements. I still have certain places in my essaywriting where in which I could use improvement, such as my grammar skills. If I could improve
these skills, then I feel that my research papers would be much better than what they are now.
The biggest problem that I encountered while writing my 1984 research paper was finding
articles that supported my claim. With me being strongly for capital punishment and this being
such a conservative view, and with how liberal the media can tend to be today, it was hard to find
many articles that were not against this idea. I solved this problem by using the school-provided
databases. The databases allowed me to find all sorts of evidence I could use to support my
claim.
I believe I did well on this essay, but my grade does not accurately portray this. I made
minor mistakes such as not using parallelism in my writing and I did not format the citations

exactly how they are supposed to be in accordance with the Purdue Owl website we were told to
use as a resource. Even though I received a poor grade, I still did enjoy this project because I like
to look into and give my stance on certain political issues. The final product was satisfying
because I felt like I made a strong argument and supported it with strong evidence. The most
frustrating part of this essay was keeping my sentences parallel. Even though it was difficult, I
feel I met my goals for writing this piece of work because I thought I got my point across
thoroughly and wrote a good argument about something that I feel strongly about. My opinion
about capital punishment in the essay has not changed and I still feel like it should be something
enforced here in the United States. This piece reveals that I am good at collecting information
and organizing it into an essay when given enough time. This was surprising to me because I
dont always produce my best work on timed writes, but if I am given more time to work and
form my ideas, I can create a very strong end product.
I think my essay was similar to most other people's essays because I followed the
guidelines we were given, but I feel like I did a good job creating an argument for the issue
because the issue on capital punishment is a debate that I feel passionately about. If I were the
teacher, I would give an essay a good grade based on argumentation skills because I felt like I
did a good job forming and supporting my argument throughout the work. I would also give a
good grade for my use of the rhetorical elements because I think I made a good effort at
persuading people to agree with me on my argument including using family closure because
people don't know what it is like to have a family member's life taken away from them by an evil
person, and they could only imagine what it would be like and the hatred they would have
toward the killer. I would've given myself an A grade mainly because of the quality of the paper,
but I understand why I got points off for the incorrect formatting. I feel that my work met the

standards of the assignment because I did a good job using the newly learned rhetorical elements
to make a great persuasive essay over a world issue. I did not meet the standards because I used
improper formatting that is required for MLA documents. I think if someone were to read my
essay, they would assume that I am very passionate toward my views and that I am good at
taking the arguments against my views, and putting them down.
One thing I would like to improve upon when writing essays is paying attention to minor
details such as formatting. If I could do this piece again, I would love to go back to my mistakes
and correct them because if I did that, then I would have received a much better grade than I got
on this work. I would also like to improve my grammar because I made many grammatical errors
when working on this project, and I also feel like we should go over common grammar practices
much more in school because I am well behind where I feel I should be when writing these
papers. My teacher next year should know that I love to form arguments and debate my side of
them and that I am not very strong at analyzing text. I would show next years' teacher my poorly
written timed writes that I wrote this year to show that I could use some help in some areas of
writing as wel.