Reflection of Portfolio

I choose animal rights as my overall topic for the semester. I choose this topic because I am really against animal abuse and it kills me to see a helpless animal being abused. I am still happy with my topic as I learned a lot about it that I never knew before. Goals I had for my research was to find out the difference between animal rights and animal welfare and what is the best possible solution to make sure that animals are being treated fairly. I did not want to convince people about animal rights but rather inform them about the ways animals are being treated. The most interesting fact I learned about animal rights was that there are laws in place for animal testing and that animals do not experience much pain. This projected helped me gain a better understanding of my topic as a whole and actually changed my stance about animal rights. It made me realize that animal welfare is more important than animal rights. I collected tons of information about my project and found that it was not that difficult to find information because animal right has been a controversial topic in the media for many years now. This project made me able to better understand the research process and that writing an annotated bibliography actually makes it easier to reference your sources when writing the final paper. Also throughout this semester, I learned how to write synthesis paragraphs, which made writing longer papers for my others classes so much easier and less stressful. The photo essay was definitely the hardest and most challenging piece for me to write. I do not see myself as the creative type and going out and finding pictures to create an argument out of was extremely difficult for me. Especially because my topic was about K-9 units, so whenever I wanted to go take pictures I had to go all the way to my dad’s work. The most interesting project by far had to be the research paper. Although the paper was extremely difficult and somewhat stressful, it helped me there a lot about animal rights and completely change my views toward them. I decided to arrange this project the way I did, so that it is in chronological order in the way that I completed each of the assignments. I did this so that the reader can see how my writing improves over the course of the semester and the steps I took to as a writer to get to my final projects. Working with my peers was a helpful experience. They pushed me into the right direction to go with my paper and were not afraid to be critical of my paper. Also reading there papers showed me how to correctly organize and structure my papers.