11/2-11/10 #1

For the past couple weeks I have thought deeply upon what I would like to include in my writing portfolio at the end of this year and looking back I have found that while I haven’t written any outstanding papers I also haven’t written any that are terrible either. Upon review of my previous papers I have decided that I will probably include the third paper we wrote in which I described the effects we have on the Grande Ronde Aquifer and argued that we need to reduce its consumption in order to leave water for the next generation. For this paper we had to write in a group of 3-4 people. I found it to be very difficult to be able to incorporate all the group members’ ideas in the paper seeing as when someone had an idea we would write a paragraph or so about it and it was hard to be partial to everyone. An advantage of this paper however is that because we only had one person write it, it is one singular voice which makes the paper flow a lot better.
I will also include this next research paper that I plan to write about the destruction in Darfur and how climate change has had a very large in the violence of this region. This paper is longer than the papers that I have grown accustomed to writing but will hopefully be a better overall work because it is the culmination of all the previous work I have done so far this semester. This paper is interesting me in the way that there has been much discussion on Darfur in these past couple years and after listening to so many outside sources I can finally look through all the information I can find and form my own conclusion as to what is going on over there.
I am currently debating on whether I should include the second paper which I thought we did very well on. But looking at it now there are glaring deficiencies in each persons writing style and I feel like no matter how many changes I make to it, it probably still will not be worthy of including in the portfolio. This second paper was by far the hardest to write and to incorporate each persons section into a decent paper. Each person wrote differently and seemed to cite sources in a different manner as well.
Another paper I have considered including in the portfolio is the first paper in which we had to write about our past writing experiences. This paper probably has the best chance to include the other two. Some changes need to be made to it though, including moving some paragraphs around and possibly lengthening it a little bit. This first paper was a bit of a struggle for me to write because my peer review on it had a lot of comments and really gave me a good idea what I needed to work on and what my strengths were.