PERSONAL REFLECTION ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY

This assignment was originally hard for me, but I thought it was interesting how we had to send it to someone directly. For this assignment, I chose euthanasia because I thought it was a topic of hot debate. I did not realize how iffy it would be to write about. The whole time I was writing I felt as if I was treading on thin ice trying not to offend my reader.

I came across as patronizing in a few sections and found extremely difficult to change my tone. I tried to maintain a respectful tone throughout my essay because if I did not it could have turned my reader away immediately. I took the format of a counter-argumentative essay for the first few paragraphs which I think strengthen everything.

I found different sources where the judge shared his opinions on euthanasia and tried to dance around his opinions and beliefs. This was hard because a lot of people’s opinions on euthanasia are strongly tied to their morals and even religious beliefs. These are hard topics to convince someone to change their opinion about as they are strongly rooted. It is also easy to offend someone if you are trying to change their opinion on because it is often very personal to them.

This is why I went with a more logical approach while writing this paper.  I needed to provide logical counter-arguments to his beliefs that held not too much emotional belief. I decided to propose other options so that my reader and topics that’s weren’t so black and white. For example, I brought up disabled peoples who fall in this weird position on the topic of euthanasia.

In the end I tried proposing a new course of action. While my professor commented that it could be “squishy” I left it in because I still believed it was a good alternative. I “buttered” up my reader by saying his opinion was held high and well respected so I think that it balanced out the proposition I put forward after.

Overall, I did not change too much in my essay because the flow and ideas were there. I just changed a few sentences to remove the negative connotations and to avoid being patronizing.