Reflection on Writing my first paper in ENG 200

(during September 2005)

I had a hard time starting the dam paper. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to write about. I can tell you that I had information on the issue of Internet fraud, already. I didn’t really feel motivated to start writing the paper. The teacher got mad at me because we needed an outline and thesis by Wednesday. I said to my self, sugar! (But) I talked to him about it, after class. I had a hard time with how I was going to structure the paper, but after talking to Will, I had a focus of what I wanted to do, considering that I didn’t follow my outline exactly as planed. Well, when I started thinking about the paper, I had too much on my mind about my personal problems that I was having with identity theft. During the first week of school I already lost my social security card, two weeks later, someone had stolen my cell phone on the city bus. When I talked to Will, he reminded me of what I wanted to write about in the first place, and I felt that was my motivation to start writing the paper. During the time that I was looking for information on Internet fraud, I would find more stuff about scams and people trying to get personal information from our computers. I had a lot of decisions to make on, if I wanted to include back ground information about hackers, the different types of frauds that are out there, but time was limited and I had already included a lot of important information. I didn’t talk about how to keep yourself safe in cyberspace, but what I did, was that I told my readers if they wanted help go to a specific web site or article that could help them, to make the paper more interactive, and not passive. I don’t know if that was a good idea, but I feel that I never finished, because I had not set a conclusion on the information that I talked about, on help to bring something across to the reader that would help them figure out the problems that I mentioned in the paper!