Hi Allen,
I think you have done it; you got this out of the realm of popular argument and into a
scholarly exploration of a topic. I think parts of it still sound a little "popular"especially
the last section about reasons; none of those reasons are explored fully and many are
based on news articles. However, the overall effect is one of a historical exploration of
the reasons for the way we think about pot, for an educated beginning scholar who
wants a more detailed and less biased report and analysis than many of those on either
the pro or antilegalization websites. All of your writing choices ("
There is a major inconsistency here that the drug policy reformers over at the Drug Enforcement Administration need to hear about")are consistent with this audience, and I think it worked.
And I am truly impressed by how much you managed to squeeze into 10 pages.
The metacommentary paragraph was absolutely necessary to setting this multipart
essay. In many ways, it's similar to the last paragraph in the introduction of Biology
papers, and serves the same purpose.
I think you had clear argument and counterargument in at least two sections, and by
and large I thought that your rebuttals worked. However, in one case, I was pretty
confused: I thought you had clear argument and counterargument in the costs and
benefits of legalization section. I thought you made a valiant effort at rebuttal in the
section about reduced productivitybut I wasn't quite sure it worked. You made a
statement without evidence (only blue collar workers smoke on the job) and then (I
think) conceded and said that you thought it *likely* that white collar workers would not
smoke on the job. I came away with a "well, we don't know yet," impression. Was that
what you meant?
While I thought your paragraphs generally flowed reasonably well, they were LONG.
There is a limited amount of time that the "reader brain" can keep everything up front
without a summary/transition; I really felt like you were crowding that limit. Similarly,
while I could see clear transitions, and I was sure where you were going most of the
time, I thought some of your transitions were pretty abrupt.
Grade: A
In our long rooted history dating back to our founding fathers, alcohol has always had a
incentive. When the government tried to implement Prohibition in the early 20th century to ban alcohol by citing its known and proven harmful effects, nothing happened besides public outrage
and alcohol eventually returned to the shelves after a decade. Marijuana, a relatively harmless
drug on the other hand, was criminalized in 1937 by the Marijuana Tax Act for all the wrong
reasons and was eventually wrongly classified as a dangerous Schedule I drug in 1970 under
the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). There is a major inconsistency here that the drug policy
reformers over at the Drug Enforcement Administration need to hear about. Given there are
studies that show that the legalization of marijuana can potentially produce profound benefits for
society that may outweigh its burdens, why is it criminalized while alcohol, an undisputedly
harmful drug, is legal?
Before attempting to tackle the legalization debate, I examine the legal history of
marijuana and why it was criminalized. Next, I examine the science of the Schedule I
classification criteria and determine whether or not marijuana is deserving of its current
classification. This effectively establishes the precedent that our government is not willing to
change. I then go on to analyze the benefits and burdens of legalization and effectively show
that there is no reason not to legalize it. This all sets the stage for the real question: there is a
huge discrepancy between potential outlasting effects and legal status so why does the
government still criminalize marijuana? Through careful analysis of marijuana scheduling,
legalization, and political research, I examine why this is the case and why the government
should change this moving forward.
Prior to the 20th century, there were no regulations on marijuana and it was a cash crop in the United States just as much as tobacco. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the public
opinion on marijuana started to shift towards a negative manner. In short, Mexicans in the West
and African-Americans in the East were associated with marijuana use, which prompted a string
of racism against the drug. Things didn’t get any better when Harry Anslinger was named
crusader, teamed with William Hearst, the owner of all the biggest newspapers at the time, to
create a national yellow journalism propaganda campaign against marijuana. Anslinger’s
motivation was simple: combine personal hatred/lewd racism with protecting the corporate
interests of timber and pharmaceutical industries to eliminate marijuana. With this in mind,
Anslinger presented to Congress the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 and effectively criminalized
marijuana singlehandedly (Guither 2012). This, along with the CSA, set the cultural precedent
for why marijuana was banned and put it in a legal chokehold to begin with, making it easier to
explain later why the government still holds its harsh anti-drug views.
The next step in this process is assessing why marijuana is considered a dangerous
narcotic. The CSA classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug under the following conditions:
1. The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse (defined by DSM as a maladaptive pattern of substance use leading to clinically significant impairment)(Jones 2010).
2. The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States (no clinical trials to prove medical efficacy).
3. There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
During 1970, not enough research was done on the properties of marijuana so Congress placed
marijuana under Schedule I. However, a closer examination of some primary studies of
marijuana’s pharmacological effects gives us reason to question this classification. Trends in
pharmacological sciences published a study done in 1992 documenting the abuse potential of
marijuana in human subjects, which can be mainly ascribed to marijuana’s potential for
addiction. They studied the human tolerance and dependence on marijuana by giving subjects
marijuana extracts orally every four hours for up to 21 days. After abruptly taking subjects off the
drug, the withdrawal symptoms were relatively mild, even in the most intense exposure group.
There were very few reports of abrupt termination of marijuana leading to incapacitation and
high abuse potential, as most people were fine after quitting. Although this study shows that
marijuana can have high abuse potential in very rare cases, most subjects could control their
1992). The next criteria, accepted medical use, has to deal with the availability of controlled
clinical trials to prove that marijuana does have medical benefits. During the time of the CSA
enactment, little to no clinical trials had been conducted, and the ones that had were very poorly
executed. However, in the past decade, a plethora of well-administered, controlled clinical trials
testing the usefulness of medical marijuana have surfaced. These studies have all shown that
marijuana can treat diseases ranging from schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, cancer, anxiety,
and many more with positive results (Clinical Studies and Case Reports 2011). Perhaps the
most useful is marijuana’s analgesic value. WebMD recently pointed out a clinical study that
tested the effect of marijuana on relieving pain in patients who had chronic nerve pain. The
highest dose of 9.4% THC (via smoke inhalation from a gelatin capsule) provided pain relief of a
5.4 user rating, whereas the placebo was rated at a 6.1 user rating (Doheny 2010). While this
difference is modest, any reduction in pain is a sign of efficacy. Marijuana may not cure
diseases, but it has known, proven medical use in pain relief and improvement of conditions in
various diseases. Last is marijuana’s safety for use. During the passing of the CSA, not much
information was known about the biochemical effects of marijuana on the brain, which gave
legislators lots of leeway to make biased assumptions. However, more current research from
the Molecular Pharmacology journal describes marijuana’s safe biochemical effects on the
brain. “Cannabinoids produce their action like benzodiazepines and other modern
pharmaceuticals that activate or moderate endogenous receptor systems” (Devane et al. 1989)
instead of the previous hypothesis that marijuana resin clogged up circuits in the brain through
cell membrane perturbation (Gettman 2001). Basically the THC from marijuana binds to the
CB1 receptor sites in the brain, which is chemically much safer than the diffusion of marijuana
resins throughout the brain. This, coupled with the fact that it is physically impossible to die from
a marijuana overdose (Iversen 2000), disproves the fact that marijuana is not safe for the body.
By systematically showing that marijuana does not fit each of the Schedule I criteria, it is clear
official controlled clinical studies emerging in the past ten years, many state governments have
recognized this and legalized the use of medical marijuana, which is the first step to blanket
legalization. This leads up to the last part of my paper, which has everything to do with why the
federal government followed has yet to follow suit.
Now that I’ve explained the legal and CSA precedent, we must now analyze if at all, the
benefits of legalizing marijuana outweigh the harms. The two main benefits that must be
considered are the potential tax revenue and the decrease in crime. An official government
report titled, “The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition” goes into the potential
revenue that legalizing marijuana could produce. In short, the report estimates that legalizing
marijuana would save $7.7 billion per year on government expenditure on law enforcement of
prohibition, with $5.3 billion coming from state/local governments and $2.4 billion coming from
the federal government (Miron 2005). Prohibiting marijuana also prevents it from being sold and
thus taxed, which is another sector of revenue that could yield up to “$2.4 billion annually if
marijuana were taxed like all other goods and $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed at
rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco” (Miron 2005). According to this report, if over
$10 billion could be saved every year by legalizing marijuana, this money could go to new jobs
and education, which could really benefit our economy. However, let’s not forget the
counterargument. Opponents argue that legalization will lead to more smoking and less
productivity in the workforce. Economically speaking, less productivity equates to a loss of
revenue, so let’s see if this is really the case. According to a study done in the Journal of
Human Resources titled, “Marihuana and work performance: Results from an experiment”,
heavy use of marijuana does not interfere with productivity levels and “the capacity to carry out
vocational responsibilities” (Kagel 1980). It was discovered that although marijuana use on the
job did equate to less time spent working especially right after smoking, “these effects were
sufficiently well contained, and offset by increased productivity during other times, that they did
important to note that this study was done on vocational workers, who are much more likely to
smoke marijuana on the job than white-collar workers. Secondly, vocational workers practice
procedural knowledge (performance of physical tasks) whereas white-collared workers usually
practice declarative knowledge (performance of cognitive tasks). The connection between these
two points lies in the fact that marijuana does not adversely affect physical tasks. In some
cases when the vocational tasks were very tedious, the high from marijuana provided the
motivation to push through. This is not the case for the intellectual tasks that white collared
workers face—marijuana would absolutely result in a loss of productivity. The beauty of this
argument is that it’s almost always vocational workers who smoke marijuana, because they
don’t have to risk losing productivity. This is because most educated white-collared workers are
rational enough to not smoke on the job, as they know it will negatively affect their productivity.
So the potential productivity losses can be isolated mostly within the vocational worker group,
which I have already proven is at no risk for an actual loss of productivity and thus minimal
economic revenue is lost. This is a nuanced argument because it assumes that only vocational
workers smoke on the job. Also, the workforce landscape has changed since 1980, meaning
we must account for all types of workers and their weed-smoking habits. However, it’s
important to consider that when people smoke on the job, they generally do so because they
know it will not impact their output negatively or because it motivates them. This is why overall
productivity will not be drastically affected, and not lead to any noticeable revenue losses.
The other benefit to legalizing marijuana is the decrease in crime rates on multiple
scales. The first aspect deals with interior crime rates. According to the 2008 FBI annual uniform
crime report, police arrested 847,864 people for marijuana violations, which accounted for
49.8% of all drug arrests. Of those 847,864 people, approximately 89% were only charged with
possession. If possession of marijuana were legal, there would have been 754,224 less petty
possession arrests and legal costs (Armentano 2009). Furthermore, an article titled, “The
of Drug Issues examines this relationship. Through careful examination of empirical crime
statistics, it was determined that recent marijuana law enforcement policies do not “benefit
society by reducing non-drug crime or by reducing participation in other illicit drug related crime”
(Shepard et a. 2007). Crimes unrelated to marijuana will still be committed at the same rates. As
it currently stands, prohibition is doing nothing for crime rates besides sapping into our
enforcement resources. However, if marijuana was sold in a legal and regulated market, our
police force would be free to focus their resources on more serious crimes like rape and murder
—resulting in a decrease in non-drug related crimes.
From a different perspective, marijuana legalization has a huge impact on the drug war
going on outside our borders. As a result of Operation Intercept in 1969 to counteract Mexican
drug trafficking into the US, there has been a constant battle between the cartels and the
US/Mexican government. As a result, countless of gang members, militia, and innocent civilians
have been killed in the midst of the drug violence. The best solution to lessen the toll of the drug
war is legalizing marijuana. According to a report published by the RAND Corporation, it’s
estimated that marijuana constitutes 15-26% of total sales for drug cartels. If legal marijuana
were available at dispensaries like groceries at a supermarket, this would siphon billions of
dollars out of the black market and into the hands of legitimate companies who grow marijuana
legally on our home turf. Decreasing drug trafficking, even if at most produces only a 26% drop,
has profound results. The RAND article hypothesizes that in the short run; there may be an
increase in violence as the cartels run into unexpected changes of circumstances. However, in
the long run, less people will be inclined to join cartels as marijuana becomes more regulated
and the money is in the hands of corporations (Kilmer et al. 2010). The article speculates how
long it will actually take for the crime rates to drop. But one thing is for sure: legalization is the
most conceivable method to reduce the violence caused by this ongoing war on drugs.
It wouldn’t be fair to just simply assert that legalizing marijuana is only beneficial without
economic approach to legalizing drugs in her primary scholarly study, “Economic approaches to
the decriminalization of drugs”. She concludes that from an economic perspective, legalizing
and subsidizing the costs of marijuana would indeed make it more appealing to people who
never tried it before due to price. In addition, she also concludes that each new drug user would
be responsible for persuading around three friends to try the drug, in a model that looks like
3-9-27-81 (Bretteville-Jensen 2006). We can’t expect this to be the case for every user, but the
picture is clear: with each new drug user comes the potential for more people to [ab] use the
drug. But the key here is assessing the potential net value of legalization. If $10 billion in
revenue can be produced and forwarded to drug education/harm-reduction programs, and
thousands of lives can be saved in the war on drugs, having more marijuana abusers on the
streets is a more than acceptable trade-off.
Clearly, the benefits of legalizing marijuana far outweigh the potential burdens. Why is it
then, that we still haven’t legalized it yet and more importantly, why is it that alcohol, which is
proven to be more harmful, legal? Part of the answer lies in the public perception of each drug.
Whereas marijuana has endured a rough path of harsh government putdown to get to its current
legal status, alcohol has breezed through our legal system despite its known ill effects on the
body. This is largely because our country was founded on alcohol. Even when the government
tried to implement Prohibition, it was only met with public outrage, alcohol smuggling, and a firm
re-evaluation of our identity. Soon after, they reverted back to decriminalizing alcohol due to
Prohibition’s horrible public opinion ratings as well as alcohol’s tax revenue potential.
It’s interesting how the government referred to Prohibition as a “noble experiment”
whereas it refers to marijuana prohibition as the “war on drugs”. It shows two completely
different attitudes towards the same issue—one is an experiment, the other is a war. In large,
alcohol’s rich history set the status quo, so we’ve grown to just accept it. The marijuana
legalization debate couldn’t be more opposite in terms of established precedents. According to
stance for a zero tolerance argument: “marijuana is an illegal drug; no one should ever use
illegal drugs; therefore, no one should ever use illegal drugs for any reason” (Clark 2000).
Specifically, the government lacks vision when it comes to accepting medical benefits for fear of
sending the wrong message to the public. As sad as it is, the zero tolerance argument is
grounded by irrational logic and faulty precedents set forward with the Marijuana Tax Act of
1937 and the CSA of 1970. Why is the government unwilling to budge on their zero tolerance
position despite the plethora of positive research that has surfaced in the past forty years?
Part of the reason is due to the restrictions that the Congress places on official medical
marijuana research, which makes rescheduling difficult. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
recently published an entry about the governmental restrictions on medical marijuana testing.
Investigators need to obtain a special license from the DEA to perform official clinical trials on
marijuana, but this process indirectly calls upon the National Institutes of Drug Abuse to provide
marijuana, which is technically illegal:
NIDA’s system for evaluating requests for marijuana for research has resulted in some researchers who hold DEA registrations and requisite approval from the Department of Health and Human Services being unable to conduct their research because NIDA has refused to provide them with marijuana (Cohen 2010).
This sort of circular logic (we can’t do tests because it’s illegal, therefore it’ll never leave the
realm of illegalness) has been the basis for not recognizing medical marijuana clinical trials for a
while. This policy made it difficult for legitimate clinical trials to surface until the past decade.
After many appeals to rejected clinical trials by marijuana researchers and lobbyists, the NIDA
“appears to have developed a greater willingness to supply marijuana for such studies” (Cohen
2010) while the government’s slowly starting to place science above ideology.
Another barrier to the marijuana legalization debate lies in the key chemical component
of marijuana, THC. According to The Hamline Journal of Public Law & Policy, once THC was
isolated from marijuana in the early 80s, the litigation for marijuana’s legalization became a lot
anyone (not patentable) while “synthetic THC fits into the traditional regulatory industry
framework whereby manufactured drugs are patented by huge pharmaceutical firms” (Bilz 1992)
and can be produced for profits, there is no reason to reschedule marijuana if a THC pill can be
used instead. The DEA could now “place the politically safer synthetic THC in Schedule II and
portray the drug as having all of the benefits, but none of the perceived shortcomings, of plant
marijuana (Bilz 1992). Their main point was that synthetic THC pills have controlled
dosages/lower risk of adverse side effects, making it safer than plant marijuana. However,
medical marijuana experts pointed out that patients were able to better control their dosages
through smoking joints because THC in smoke form permeates through the body much faster
than pill form (Bilz 1992). The marijuana advocates also presented clinical trial studies as
evidence that plant marijuana is more effective than THC, possibly due to unknown chemicals in
the plant that act in conjunction with THC to enhance its therapeutic effects. They cited a New
Mexico study showed that more than 90% of patients who received marijuana reported relief
from nausea while the number was less than 60% for synthetic THC (Bilz 1992). Despite
evidence that proved marijuana’s increased effectiveness over its synthetic counterpart, the
skewed politics ultimately took over scientific facts and kept the rescheduling campaign at bay.
The last reason marijuana is still illegal is due the many different groups lobbying for
prohibition. Since marijuana is not patentable, large pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be able
to profit from it if the plant itself were to be legalized. A lot of patients would turn to legally grown
cheap marijuana instead of traditional pain relief drugs. A Time magazine article from 2002
captures this belief that, “politicians are in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies who fear
marijuana is such good medicine that their own products will suffer. (Stein 2002)” This is a
reasonable claim because it explains earlier how DuPont, a pharmaceutical company, lobbied
with Anslinger and Hearst to outlaw marijuana and protect corporate interests (they didn’t want
their nylon to compete with hemp) (Guither 2012). It also explains, more recently, how the
pharmaceutical firms Bristol Meyers-Squibb, Merck, and P&G (Males 1997). These instances all
show a continuous effort by pharmaceutical companies claiming their stake in the war on drugs.
Law enforcement also has a stake in prohibition because more arrests equals job security.
According to NORML spokesman Allen St. Pierre, 30% of law enforcement is centered on
marijuana prohibition, so eliminating that would cut down the work force (Kotler 2011). The last
major anti-marijuana lobbyists are the alcohol and tobacco companies, due to competing
interests in the recreational drug market. Evidence provided by the Harm Reduction Journal
shows that 40% of the patient population willingly substituted marijuana for alcohol (Reiman
2009). Couple this finding with the fact that the California Beer & Beverage Distributors gave
$10,000 to a campaign to defeat Proposition 19 and all the evidence points to a calculated
anti-marijuana campaign (Grim 2010). With all the different interest groups lobbying, it’s easy to see
why the government has been so adamant about accepting legalization.
By now, it should be clear that marijuana was misidentified as Schedule I drug and
wrongly criminalized. Almost all of the reasons for it being classified as a Schedule I substance
have something to do with the government holding some sort of bias or precedence. The
decisions to initially ban the substance, and now the effort to maintain the ban, are completely
bereft of rational logic. At this point, with millions of educated people demanding a just policy
change and with the recent blanket legalization of marijuana in two states, the federal
government must act before a controversy arises in juxtaposition between federal and state
government. It must remove itself from a drug war gone bad and admit to 40 years of failed
policy making. The time is now—for a brighter future.
References:
Abood, M. E., & Martin, B. R. (1992). Neurobiology of marijuana abuse. Trends in pharmacological sciences, 13, 201-206.
http://blog.norml.org/2009/09/14/breaking-news-marijuana-arrests-for-year-2008-847864/
Bilz, G. A. (1992). Medical Use of Marijuana: The Politics of Medicine, Hamline Journal of Public Law & Policy, 13, 117.
Bretteville-Jensen, A. L. (2006). To legalize or not to legalize? Economic approaches to the decriminalization of drugs. Substance use & misuse, 41(4), 555-565.
Clark, P. A. (2000). The ethics of medical marijuana: Government restrictions vs. medical necessity. Journal of Public Health Policy, 40-60.
Clark, P., Capuzzi, K., & Fick, C. (2011). Medical marijuana: Medical necessity versus political agenda. Medical Science Monitor, 17(12), 261.
Cohen, P. J. (2010). Medical Marijuana 2010: It's Time to Fix the Regulatory Vacuum. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 38(3), 654-666.
Devane, W. A., F. A. Dysarz III, M. R. Johnson, L. S. Melvin
and A. C. Howlett. (1989). Determination and characterization of a cannabinoid receptor in rat brain. Molecular Pharmacology. 34:605-613.
Doheny, K. (2010). Marijuana Relieves Chronic Pain, Research Shows. WebMD. Retrieved from http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/news/20100830/marijuana-relieves-chronic-pain-research-show
Felder, C., & Glass, M. (1998). Cannabinoid receptors and their
endoge-nous agonists. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology. 38:179-200.
Gettman, J. (2001). Cannabis and the US Controlled Substances Act. Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics, 1(1), 95-109.
Grim, R. (2010). California Pot Initiative Opposed By Beer Industry. Huffington Post. Retrieved from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/21/this-buds-not-for-you-bee_n_732901.html
Guither, P. (2012) Why is Marijuana Illegal? Drug WarRant.com. Retrieved from http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/why-is-marijuana-illegal/
Iversen, L. L. (2000). The Science of Marijuana. London, England: Oxford University Press
Jones, F. (2010). sis.indiana.edu. Retrieved from http://www.sis.indiana.edu/DSM-IV-Criteria.aspx
Julien, R. M. (1995). A Primer of Drug Action: A Concise, Nontechnical Guide to the Actions, Uses, and Side Effects of Psychoactive Drugs. (7th ed.). New York, NY: W. H. Freeman and Co.
Kilmer, B., Caulkins, J. P., Bond, B. M., & Reuter, P. H. (2010). Reducing drug trafficking revenues and violence in Mexico. RAND Corporation.
Kotler, S. (2011). Who Is Secretly Working To Keep Pot Illegal? TruTv. Retrieved from http://www.trutv.com/conspiracy/in-the-shadows/pot-illegal/cops-alcohol-tobacco.html Males, M. (1997). Pot Boiler. Fair.org Retrieved from
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/pot-boiler/
Miron, J. A. (2005). The budgetary implications of marijuana prohibition. Marijuana Policy Project.
Reiman, A. (2009). Cannabis as a substitute for alcohol and other drugs. Harm Reduction Journal, 6(1), 35.
Rios, V., & Shirk, D. (2011). Drug Violence in Mexico: Data and Analysis Through 2010. Trans-Border Institute. San Diego.
Shepard, E. M., & Blackley, P. R. (2007). The impact of marijuana law enforcement in an economic model of crime. Journal of Drug Issues, 37(2), 403-424.
Stamper, N. (2010, Apr. 20). Legalization Will Reduce Crime, Free Up Police Resources.
Marijuana & Money, A CNBC Special Report. Retrieved from
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(2011). Clinical Studies and Case Reports. Cannabinoid Medicines. Retrieved from http://www.cannabis-med.org/studies/study.php
Self Assessment
1. I thought that overall, I achieved all of the major checkpoints of a solid research paper. I spent a lot of time crafting an introduction and question that had a main focus throughout the paper. I then solidified this question by writing a
claims to the audience, such as the benefits, burdens, and potential reasons for halting legalization. The only times I didn’t have to use scholarly sources was when I was stating general facts that are for the most part undisputed. Those were all meticulously planned and took a lot of thought and effort. Even more importantly were the arguments I was making. For each argument, I think I effectively justified it with scholarly evidence as well as provided a counterargument with scholarly
evidence. As far as the structure and cohesion goes, I provide a metacommentary that goes through it systematically and it progresses in a way that makes sense logically to the reader. It starts with history, benefits, burdens, and lastly why we haven’t done anything yet. Overall, this was the most effort I have ever put into a single paper, and I hope my grade reflects that . Verdict: A
2. As far as reflecting from my first paper and my final research paper, they are two completely different papers so it’s hard to say if one is really better than the other. I think at first, the kind of writing we did was much more basic, breaking down how effective someone else’s writing was. Compare this to a cumulative research paper with scholarly sources to back up everything you have to say, and it’s a hard comparison to make. Certainly, this final paper took a lot more time, and a lot more thought went behind it, but they both papers deserve similar merit in different ways. One is crafting your own argument and pursuing it yourself and the other is looking at someone else’s writing. As far as improvement as a writer, I have definitely improved by a mile. I had never even written an ethical argumentative paper or a
comprehensive scholarly research paper prior to college so these were really valuable skills that I learned and will take with me wherever I go in the future. I am thankful we got to do a research paper because it really opened my eyes to the scholarly literature out there and how it is fundamentally different speaking to a scholarly audience than writing for a high school teacher. You can’t just say stuff and expect your audience to take everything for granted; everything has to have a reason and scholarly evidence. That’s the biggest takeaway I got from taking this class. 3. Dear Students,
If you want to succeed in this class, then listen carefully. All you really have to do is do your informal assignments seriously and all your work will be done for you when the formal papers come up. I swear, a lot of the informal assignments do an excellent job prepping you for essay writing, so when the professor says that one in particular is important, be sure to focus a lot of time and effort into it— these will making writing your actual paper a lot easier. Also, I cannot stress this enough, but go to the professor’s office hours. She can help you with anything you are having trouble with, whether or not that is finding a question, finding sources, fleshing out details, addressing a counterargument, poking holes in your argument—it is easily the most valuable resource in the course. So if you
capitalize on these two resources, you will be golden. Also, on a side note, don’t make the same mistake as me and try to do a topic for your final paper that you think will be easy because in reality, if you can’t find enough scholarly literature, then you may be shooting yourself in the foot. Stick to more broad topics with a lot of present research and also, know exactly what question you are asking so you can find your sources easily and not waste time not knowing what to look for. This is basically it, you do all of these things and you will do well in this class. That is a promise.
