Braden Vance

Kelsey Smith

WRT 150       

23 July 2014

Blog Post #4

            My research process is to go online, think about how I want to convince people that what I believe is correct, and then I go searching for sources that will back my claims up without taking my feet from under me. I tend to overlook counterarguments because for the sake of time, I need to put down on paper what is important to my argument, not what could potentially undermine me; therefore I do not waste precious space and time catering to the whims of those I oppose. In the end though, that does cause problems for me because he who has no counterargument, also has no argument. It is kind of like that in life. You cannot be happy unless you have known what it is to be sad. You cannot have an argument that will hold up under fire unless you take care of the other side as well; in short, in order to be correct, you must prove the other side wrong first. This is a better method than the one I used to follow, but I still find it hard to pamper the other side; the enemy, if you will. I find research very intriguing, but only if it is about a subject I truly care for, such as why gun control is wrong and harmful to society as a whole. I have done no research for this specific Issues paper, but I have written many papers in the past on this very subject, traveled through the intense mazes of the world wide web, and trekked through  book after book on guns, control of said weapons, and how it is people that kill people, not guns – just as it is not the spoon nor the fork that maketh a man fat. I could change my research process by actually writing down where I get my sources from when I find them instead of quoting them, and then having to go back to find them, and then not being able to do so. Then I get to experience the glorious joy of deleting all my hard thought quotes and going back to the world wide web to find other less helpful ones. I really think that the key to doing well on future papers is to do a little research at a time, and not cram the day before the paper is due – as in all facets of life, cramming causes headaches.