Mohamed Yousuf
Retrospective Essay
English W131

Writers Statement for Essay 2/ Retro Rough Draft In essay one, my main difficulty was choosing a topic to write on. I think the main reason behind this was because Sandel brought up many scenarios that all fell under one general topic. I felt as if each topic that he brought up had its own different argument against it and that some of his example argued for him and some actually went against him. So I believe that this was the main reason behind why I found essay one to be more difficult. Essay 1 was an argumentative essay. This means you have to choose a side either for or against the argument already provided. Before you choose a side, you have to understand what the argument is about. If you don’t understand what the argument is, you wont know what to argue for or against and this will lead to writing about random stuff. This then defeats the purpose of writing the essay. This is what made writing it very difficult for me. Although I had many difficulties writing essay 1, I learned a lot from it. From reading the book, it wasn’t clear which side the author took on the topic provided. But by reading more and more, you get an idea on what side he is arguing for based on his writing style. At first, I thought I knew which side the author took and I agreed to it. After the in class discussions and collaboration work, I realized that I was wrong and had the wrong idea of what the argument was. The collaboration with other classmates is what really broadened my understanding of what was going on in the book and that helped better develop my essay. After receiving the feed back from my professor, I realized that my understanding of what I was supposed to write about was not met. One of the main things that was wrong with my essay was that it was too abstract. It was also too general. What was expected was to choose one issue raised in Sandel’s book, and elaborate upon that