Malcolm Gladwell Reflection

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Writing is not my forte. I have always had to work hard to put things on paper. Early on I learnt the phrase: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again.” The key to improving at writing is to write, and write, and rewrite, and just keep on writing. Eventually, an assignment is complete and you sit back and enjoy reading it. To complete my undergraduate requirements, I enrolled this semester in the Cornerstone Seminar. The syllabus for Cornerstone Seminar 101 states that the goal of the course is to teach:” critical thinking, research writing, and interactive digital communication.” The purpose of this assignment is for me to recognize and track my progress in any or all of these areas as this eight- week course progressed.
The Cornerstone …show more content…
In this course you really have to think. From the start, reading different chapters in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, and analyzing them requires critical thinking. Gladwell is such a prolific and convincing writer that you almost “fall” for his arguments. You really have to mull over his chapters. The textbooks, Weston’s Rulebook for Arguments and Booth et al.’s Craft of Research, help to evaluate arguments that Gladwell wrote in his book. It took me a while to grasp how to properly analyze a chapter and format my responses in MLA/ APA format. My discussion post for week 2, Arguments by Analogy, was not sufficiently thorough. Consequently, I worked on correcting this in the post for week 3, Causes and Correlation. Putting the discussions for week2 and week3, in my digital portfolio is a testament to how my writing gradually started to improve. Seeing the grading rubric for each weekly assignment helps me focus on where I needed to improve. By the time we reached week 6, I got a perfect score for my analysis of the stereotypes and truths that Gladwell uses in chapter 8 of his book.
The next set of assignments dealt with creating and writing a research paper. This was the most taxing. You really have to create arguments and counter arguments to make your topic work. Often, when a topic is part of the course curriculum, some of these arguments are already hinted to. As I draft this paper, I will keep in mind the rules of arguments to verify that the research studies succeed in showing a definite correlation and not just a casual
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