The Final Paper and it's Process

For the final assignment in English we were asked to write a mediation paper and to be honest I didn’t think it was going to be all that hard. I was mistaken because it took me forever to find a topic that I wanted to write about. I eventually decided that I was going to do “Pros and Cons of Greek Life.”

I am in a fraternity and a lot of my friends are in fraternities and sororities as well so I figured that this paper would be a breeze. I was mistaken again because I had trouble coming up with cons because I didn’t want to say bad things about something that I am associated with. Also, it was very difficult to find sources to back most of the points I was trying to make.

For my rough draft, I ended up only having a little over three pages when the final paper had to be minimum six. I knew after that that I needed to get to work and find some legitimate sources to help back both sides of my argument. The problem with finding sources online and in surveys was that almost all of them just said bad things about Greek life. Before I started writing this paper I told myself that I was going to try and do it without any interviews because obviously people in Greek organizations are going to say the complete opposite of people not involved in them.

I had to interview people because I wasn’t getting very far any other way. So I decided to interview to presidents of Greek life and two complete strangers that I would assume were not involved in an organization. The interviews with the presidents went well and gave me some valuable information but the people not in Greek life weren’t much of a help because they just bashed Greek life and that was about it.

Luckily I finally came across a website that gave lots and lots of statistics and it helped me to easily write another 3 pages. Most of the information was alcohol related but there were other statistics too that I used.

When I went back for the final round of editing the only major problems that I continuously came across were constant spelling errors so it took me a while to fix all of those. Also, I would leave out words and the sentence would make no sense.

Eventually the paper came out to be pretty good and do consider it the best thing that I have written or done in English 103 this semester. This was also the most difficult thing, I think, that we have done all semester because it is hard not to pick one side of an argument.