Self Analysis

Immediately after receiving the blog assignment in English 101 I had no idea what topic I was going to argue.  I had never fully engaged myself in politics before and I figured I had a daunting task ahead of me.  Not only did I have to present a politically argued topic in my blog, I also had to present both sides of the argument to create an unbiased argument.  After a few days of procrastinating I began to think of possible topics.  With the BP oil spill all over the news this year, I figured a topic concerning energy would work perfectly.  While researching different websites I began to get a basis of knowledge concerning energy and the different arguments political parties had on the topic.  It turns out that many of the arguments I read were extremely biased.  Realizing how these politicians used biased strategies to influence people’s opinions on a subject matter made me think that maybe the key to be unbiased in an argument is to present both extreme right wing viewpoints and extreme left wing viewpoints on my subject.  By doing this I can examine where each side is coming from, but if I limited myself to one political party’s take on the matter of alternative energy I would merely be limiting myself to fully understand the argument about alternative energy and breaking away from fossil fuels.  Once my research began to broaden I believe my blog posts started to hone in on my take about alternative energy and breaking away from our dependence on oil.  I began to effectively voice my opinion without ignoring one side of the argument or leaving necessary information out of my blog to influence readers.  A reader of my blog is not influenced whatsoever by my opinion, but they are thoroughly educated about the topic on alternative energy and breaking away from fossil fuels.  This blog project has allowed me to discover how to be unbiased and argue more completely about a topic.