Marlen Estrada 1301.36 Research paper draft 2

Freshman year of college has always been seen as the wild things students do, the new friends you make and tough academics. A sad fact is that not every single entering freshman makes it through the four or more years to complete his/hers bachelor degree, with highest drop out rates after only the first year of college. It makes all Universities question their way of running things in their institutions but after decades of research they have came to the conclusion that what students face the most difficulty with is college requirements in writing and reading  what is most popularly called “College readiness” and not only that that’s what is the major factor in college success but that students have not been properly prepared to complete those tasks by their high schools or previous school. It is shocking and almost sad to see perfectly capable college freshman failing, dropping out or withdrawing from school because they cannot perform their college tasks and assignments.

So many factors can be blamed for students unpreparedness in their college reading and writing starting with the rules we are all taught since elementary school, “you need at least 5 paragraphs, an introduction, body, and conclusion”, brainstorming, don’t go off topic, catchy opening sentence, your conclusion should summarize your whole paper and etc. All those rules we have been taught for years now don’t mean anything in college, instead we need a new mind set, a whole new way of looking and thinking about our writing and reading  and even more specifically in our college research paper. In college writing to start off you’ll need the eight habits of minds, like discussed in “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing”, which include curiosity, the drive to discover and explore more beyond your present limits, openness “your willingness to consider new ways of thinking and of being”, engagement your personal involvement in subjects or your own work, creativity, persistence always engaging, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition you are never taught how to use these skills in your writing. In contrast your given tons of rules to follow and never to question that strictly interfere with flexibility, one of the 8 habits of mind, what Mike Rose concludes in his study of writers block is that students facing writers block take these rules and use them like “algorithms” instead of “heuristics” and students who did not face writers block “brought plans to the writing process that were more functional, more flexible, and more to information from the outside.” .Rules used like “algorithms functions are constant, procedures are routine, and outcomes are completely predictable” writing is never constant in that way and much less always produces something “predictable” the opposite is quite true every paper or writing is unique like the individual writing it. But as we try to implement those rules, and every other preconcived skill learned from high school we find that students get stuck, experience writers block and even end up writing “what they think others want them to write rather than looking to see what is is they want to write.” as mentioned by Sondra Perl in her research with the whole composing process.

How could we ever drift off to create some masterpiece of a research paper full of insightful research, of knowledge, of authority, of rhetorical appeal, and good reflection when all we see is black and white, wrong or right, like Kelsey Diaz points out us students strive to find the right answer or “the truth” in everything as if that was all that existed, but there is much more than that, another strong point Diaz mentions in her paper is that all no matter where a writing comes from either from a professional or not their still a human being, a human being with their own purpose of writing. In addition Penrose and Geisler go on to say that the difference in thinking of a graduate and an undergraduate (freshman) when it came to their research paper and how they saw their sources is that the graduate saw “Texts are authored. Authors present knowledge in form of claims. Knowledge claims can conflict. Knowledge claims can be tested.”  What it is that a freshman would know nothing about challenging a professionals writing much less a knowledge based claim they view as fact.

I would like help or advise in the arrangement of ideas and how I presented them, an I clear in what I want to say, etc. and How could I rhetorically improve my claims. Among anything else that could possibly improve my quality of writing.