My Personal Grade Report

           I wrote my research paper on the controversy over the abolishment of the death penalty in the United States. I argued that the death penalty should be abolished based on a number of reasons. The first was because the death penalty has been steadily losing support in the U.S. since the late 1990s. Second, was that the court systems in the U.S. try so hard to give a “fair” trial that the process of law becomes incredibly slow. Third, I argued that the death is not as economically sound as other means of punishment such as life without parole. I also counter argued that the death penalty was not cheaper than life without parole because of the length between a sentenced given and carried out. Throughout the paper I also mentioned the moral side of the death penalty including how killing a person is not justice for the death of another.

           I believe I met the requirements of the paper, but could have gone a little further in my research. I believe I could have gone much further in supporting my argument with statistics and specific examples. I also was short on the required number of words. I think this was connected to the lack of research and will need to improve that for my final draft. Finally of course is my grammar. I always have a problem with grammar in papers. No matter how many times I look over it, I always have at least one run on sentence and comma splice. I will always need to improve my grammar.

           Overall I believe I did well on my paper, but like anything else can be improved in some way. I had positives because I think my arguments were strong and supported my topic quite well. However, my lack of research causes my argument to kind of lose it power. If I were to grade my paper right now, I believe it would be at the B or B+ level.