As I continued through this course, I learned how to be more comfortable with writing many drafts and being able to go back and revise my previous work. I used to have a very hard time trying to write first drafts because I thought they had to be perfect and I never felt comfortable going back to revise it. In my significant writing project I cut a lot of my writing out in the first body paragraph, because it was just about the Coates article, and there was way too much background here. I then used one of the quotes I cut out in this paragraph to create another paragraph later in the paper. I think moving this around made the point of the paper more clear, and allowed me to add more about how I connected the three articles together to create a claim. The fourth paragraph I added after cutting my beginning introduction paragraph short.

“Dweck has done extensive research on how fixed minded people will act next time they are faced with another challenge. She found those people would take extreme measures in order to succeed next time. “In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test…in study after study, they have run from difficulty” (Dweck 8:15). When shortcuts such as cheating are taken, people lose the opportunity to learn and grow from the experience. The ability to face a challenge head on creates a space to learn from the failure instead of continually running from it. Whites are allowed to take these shortcuts in order to succeed. Blacks cannot take these shortcuts because of the broken governmental systems, such as the criminal justice system and the housing market. These systems were built to disadvantage blacks, and cause them to miss out on the protections given to whites. Black people are forced to work harder and smarter to be given the same as whites. Blacks are “…working without a safety net” (Coates pg 10). This safety net refers to many privileges whites have that blacks do not have. Banks, police, the laws for all citizens were places whites can fall back on when they needed to. But blacks had no place that they could fully trust, because all over the country blacks were being treated differently. The governmental systems today are still the same, and continue to create this inequality between whites and blacks. The United States Government continues to cheat their way out of a much larger and devastating issue of our country. ”

When I added in this paragraph, I felt these quotes and ideas connected very well. It was too many topics to add into the beginning of the paper, and it flowed well with the previous paragraph I had before.