Self-Reflection on Research and Writing Skills

Reflection Paper
Your Name
Subject and Section
Professor’s Name
August 17, 2023
My sojourn through WR 153 has been an intricate dance of discovery, discernment, and development. Beginning with the topic of Cannabis, a realm often relegated to the corners of controversy, I endeavored to unfurl its layers through a nuanced narrative lens, culminating in two distinct yet interconnected papers. Nonetheless, the whole experience helped me develop my research and writing skills.
On the one hand, Paper 1 was indeed the genesis of this exploration. The initial challenge lay not merely in collating research but discerning the credibility from the cursory. Diving deep into scholarly databases, interviews with experts, and medical journals, I soon amassed information. Yet, distilling this data into a cohesive narrative was daunting. Sometimes you even get conflicting information, while there are also times when you get overloaded with the massive information you can find from different sources. Nonetheless, I found recurring themes and topics and used these points as the main topics in the body of my paper.
Nonetheless, echoing Lamott's (1994) sentiments in "Shitty First Drafts," my early iterations were marred by discordant thoughts, seemingly jutting at tangents. A particularly stark example was the staccato statement, "Cannabis has medicinal benefits. Many dispute this. Research, however, supports it." Recognizing the need for enhanced coherence and flow, I engaged in iterative revisions. After a series of reviews, this sentence morphed into a more nuanced one, "Despite many disputing its benefits, research robustly supports the medicinal advantages of Canna...