Skills Touched Upon

• Forming Citations
• Adding quotations
• Stating the credibility of the source
• Synthesis of ideas and sources

Reflection: 

In sum this course really transitioned my high school level writing into appropriate college quality writing. Through the completion of three intense and rigorous projects, I developed essential skills that will manifest into my writing for future courses here at Dartmouth. Citing and synthesizing sources in particular proved to be one of the most important skills that developed tremendously over course of the class.

The literature review project required students to fluently weave in the ideas of outside sources in order to convey the competing viewpoints surrounding a particular topic. My topic revolved around whether Wikileaks induced an evolving level of trust between the United States government and the people. To excel and meet the guidelines of the project, I had to conduct intense research to evaluate the American and professional attitudes towards WikiLeaks. I then had to implement credible sources to demonstrate the perspective in my essay. After the first draft, I was informed by my teacher that I failed to synthesis my sources adequately. Learning from my mistake, I made sure to connect sources to each others in a manner similar to grouping. The proved to be more difficult than it initially appeared. For example, sources often agreed on some things but clashed on others and it is important that this tendency doesn’t undermine the effectiveness of my paper. This project took high school research essays to an unfamiliar and larger magnitude of difficulty. An example of an improvement occurred at

“Collectively, the heated debacle between American’s in favor of transparency and others whom see value in secrecy was initiated by WikiLeaks allowance into the logs pertaining to the Iraq War. ”

and then it was turned into

“The Pentagons remarks clearly condemned the leaks and the changing attitude while opposition such as Sorell and Shiner criticize institutions such as The Pentagon for their tendency at secrecy (Davies). In generalization, adversaries of transparency such as The Pentagon, argue that WikiLeaks inappropriately shifted the attitude of American’s towards the government with the Iraq War logs.”

This illustrates my improved ability to synthesis multiple sources in a specific and organized manner which the first draft lacked.

Outside sources was also essential during the second major project, the case study. For this project, sources and synthesis were used slightly differently. The purpose of the project was to find a compelling narrative and then form an argument about a broader topic that involves the incident that the writer narrated. For this project, I evaluated the Stuxnet event which involved a human created cyber virus infiltrating manufacturing equipment, particularly nuclear equipment. My argument then centered around whether cyber weapons such as Stuxnet constitutes as actual warfare. Sources and synthesis functioned to support my specific argument whereas in the literature review, my own arguments should have been nonexistent. Thus, when determining which resources will be implemented into the actual txt of the case review essay, I had to ensure that the effectively supported my claim and lacked any contradiction to my assertions. I ran into fewer issues when using sources in the case study essay. However, one issue when surfaced after my instructor read through my first draft was the organization of the sources and the quantity of sources. Sources were woven into body paragraphs in an unorganized fashion. Like in the first project, connecting sources was imperative in order to conjure a strong compelling argument.

For example, my synthesis for a body graph in my case study transformed from

“Collectively, these examples and other manifestations ultimately destroy tangible and intangible aspects of another country. What makes a cyber-attack different then a physical attack if in the end, the destructive results are exactly the same?”

into

 

“What makes a cyber-attack different then a physical attack if in the end, the destructive results are exactly the same? Manual’s definition of force encompasses many of the international cyber-attacks commencing such as the Stuxnet virus, but disagreement in classifying cyber-attacks as an act of war still exists when it shouldn’t.”

This change includes an improvement in synthesis by actually calling attention to a source that was vital to the argument being asserted throughout the body paragraph.

Additionally, I improved my abilities to state sources adequately as evidence by the shift

“The coalition of experts concluded that the Stuxnet virus was considered an act of force, and thus an act of war under the United Nations charter which prohibits international force.”

to

” Following the Stuxnet incident, a team of experienced scholars under a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) coalition has been deliberating methods on applying cyber-space to modern day aggression (Global Research).”

More importantly, in this example “coalition of experts” was transformed into ” a team of experienced scholars under a NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) coalition” which elevated the effectiveness and credibility of the source.

The third and final project did not require me to actually site sources in the presentation itself. However, I had to gather information from sources online in order to craft an efficient medium.

Collectively, by completing these projects, my writing improved to a level which I had not initially expected it would at the beginning of the course. In conjunction with frequent readings and in class discussions, my writing has improved dramatically.