Reflection Paper for Position Paper

The process of writing a position paper had some similarities and differences with the process of writing an informative review paper. One main difference was that I was allowed to pick a side, and defend it whereas in the informative review, I could not choose a side, instead, I had to address all sides of a particular argument or idea without appearing bias. The primary goal of a position paper was to allow the reader to accept my view on a debatable topic. The rhetorical situations I used to achieve this goal was using research that supported my argument, addressing the opposing arguments and refuting them with facts.

The primary audience of my paper was the general public, and potentially environmentalists who are interested in energy sources. This was my primary audience because my goal was to make more and more people aware of the harsh dangers of fossil fuels, and open them up to the idea that alternative energy sources need to be looked into. The motivation for my paper’s topic and key issues was that although fossil fuels are a good source of energy, they are hazardous to the environment and that affects human beings that live on planet Earth, and it is something people need to address.

My strategy for making concessions and counterarguments was to use an opposing view database that provided me with research articles that had the opposite view of mine when it came to solar energy. An example from my paper was when I found an article that claimed solar energy was too expensive to provide a sufficient amount of energy. I refuted this argument using an article that claimed that solar energy was continuing to become more affordable due to the high demand.

I found my sources using the opposing view database. I chose the articles that I did because they provided reasonable research for my argument, and for my concessions as well. The strategies I used to identifying the motivating issue in the scholarly sources of my paper was facts about the cost of solar energy, and some narratives of people or places that utilize solar energy. The collaborative and social aspects of this writing assignment helped me complete this assignment because I received new ideas from classmates who agreed with my argument on solar energy, and I was allowed to defend my argument against those who opposed solar energy as well. I used google images to provide the visual in my paper, an opposing views database to find articles, and blackboard to use in-class text to support my paper. One piece of writing from my paper I used to support my claims was, “‘The sun will continue to shine for billions of years. Each year the earth receives about four orders of magnitude more solar energy than human commercial energy consumption. After accounting for conversion losses (only 15-50 percent of solar energy incident on a solar collector is successfully collected and converted to a usable form) and inaccessible regions (oceans, the poles, mountains, and forests), hundreds of times more solar energy is available than human commercial energy consumption.’ (Blakers 2015).”