Creating a researched argument was definitely difficult for me. At the end of my senior year in high school I wrote a 25 paged research paper, but it was a little different. Our instructor gave us very clear guidelines and due dates for different parts of the paper, so when it all came together it didn’t feel like we had to sit down and churn out 25 pages. We only used jstor to find our sources and were focused more on our argument instead of the conversation we were entering.
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Learning about Greene’s “Argument as Conversation: The role of Inquiry in Writing a Researched Argument” was interesting for me. It forced me to be more aware of the sources I was reading and therefore more aware of what I was saying. When you don’t think about the fact that you are entering a scholarly conversation as a student, sometimes it’s easy to repeat ideas that have already been put forth without even realizing it. However, as Greene says “Seeing research as a means for advancing a conversation makes the research process more real” (11). When you are bringing new ideas to the table and expanding on previous ones, your argument is undoubtably stronger. That tool is one that I will be able to use for future research papers in college, so I’m glad that I got to learn about it.
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