You Can't Just Say, "Because I said so!"

So after reading chapter 9 I feel like I have a headache. Though it was very interesting and wasn't boring at all.

It was great the chapter included the fact that Sam basically summarized his research and didn't actually create an argument, because I find myself doing that a lot. It’s also great that the chapter suggested keeping your summarization to help you understand what your topic is on. That way you can address your audience more precisely, because most likely your audience already knows a decent amount of information on the topic. The suggestion to remind you of the rhetorical situation was a great suggestion especially with checklists and the charts in this chapter. I just need to remember what the research question is I’m trying to answer. Also the idea of creating cluster maps was really helpful, and I am definitely going to do that for project three. Though I already knew about qualifiers, the fact it was mentioned could be helpful for other. I did not know the exact definition of a “qualifier” which limits the claim.  Adding words such as “always”, “never” etc. doesn’t exactly limit a claim but to instead say things like “suggest”, “consider”, “could” does limit a claim. However, unlike qualifiers I did not really know much or really have thought about “warrants”. This is definitely will be something I want to revisit when reviewing my paper before I turn in the final copy. The warrant is the connection between the claim and reason in your argument. This can really help when forming your arguments to ensure your building valid support for your thesis.

 The title of chapter 10 is what is says. “Selecting and integrating evidence”. It proposes to take into consideration timeliness, relevance and other criteria to determine what evidence to choose. Though timeliness doesn’t have to be current, it has to pertain to what was happening during that time when the content was released. The most important part of chapter 10 (in my opinion) is deciding if the information is relevant, because if it isn’t then why even bothering in using it? It would serve no purpose. Once again the checklists in this chapter proved to be helpful and really helped me to realize how to approach project three and what to make sure I include.

All in all these chapters really proved to be useful and definitely worth the read. I definitely have a clearer understand on areas I want to evaluate in my project. And I definitely won't use "because I said so", in my paper.