Lucas Gibbons
Nancy Miller
English 101
10 April 2014
Dear Nancy,
Writing this research paper was a completely different endeavour than I have ever had in
my academic career. As a junior in the running start program this was my first college level
english class I have taken. Before this during my freshman and sophomore years english
was my weak point in my classes. I took AP and honors classes besides my regular english
class. I remember one of the prompts of the few persuasive essays I wrote in those classes.
It was write an essay explaining why our school should have security cameras. A writing
prompt such as that is very boring and leaves you with a paper that is an argument but not
very controversial or offensive. In one of my free writes we did I talked about this and how
I don’t see how I can write a powerful paper if the topic is something boring and non
offensive. After taking this class and doing this research paper I found a place I can
blossom.
When we first started thinking about this paper I had just written one of my better essays
for our first assignment. I was pretty happy with the product an eager to move onto this
paper. Immediately after sitting down to start working on the ideas for this paper it hit me.
I realized I had to write about this topic in a more formal persuasive way. My paper before
was more of a story that just flowed onto the page while this one was impossible. I sat at
my computer for a solid 30 minutes before I had an idea for this paper.
My first idea was to write about power dynamics and how our everyday lives revolve
around them. This was a fairly philosophical idea and I knew it was going to be hard to
write a ten page paper on this with scholarly sources so I moved on. I came up with the
idea to write about limited government and why its a good thing. After moving to the
focused ideas paper on limited government I realized it was way too broad and I couldn’t
find a solid argument so I slimmed it down into government regulations and why little
government regulation is better.
This is when I got to the thesis paper. I found myself struggling trying to find a central
