Advocacy Project Rough Draft

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Starting the AP, I guess I could say I was pretty prepared because of all the work I had done in class before. I already had my Historical Conversations Project, which would cover about one third of the final paper. I just needed to revise that essay and change it a bit so that it would fit into my AP. I was also prepared for my AP because I already had knowledge on how to conduct research, so that was not so much of a problem for me as it was for the HCP. My work on the Social Media Campaign project also helped with my AP because of the experience I gained advocating for a cause. 

 

It was a no brainer to do my AP on Colony Collapse Disorder after doing my HCP on bee cognition and behavior. I already had a good idea of what colony collapse disorder was, and after researching so much on bees, I had a genuine interest in the topic. 

 

I started my AP by writing my introduction, this I found to be the easiest, because I only needed to briefly introduce the problem. I added an easy to understand fact, "One out of every three bites of food come from bee-pollinated plants," in order to gain the readers attention. I chose to use this fact because it shows how important bees are, and can be really shocking to someone first reading it. After mentioning the fact, I explained how the fact shows how important bees are. After a few sentences, my introduction was done, I started writing the details about the problem. This was only after doing a lot of research beforehand. 

 

I now had an introduction, details on the problem, and an HCP essay. I combined the three and had my first (very) rough draft. This draft was very rough, because it wasn't a full complete draft, since I had yet to include solutions, a counterexample, and a conclusion. This first draft was reviewed by my peers, then I revised it, adjusting the organization of the essay a lot. One mistake I had on my first rough draft was that I mentioned three topics on bee cognition, but only wrote about two. The problem was that when I was copying parts of my HCP over to my AP, I had forgotten a topic. This made my essay really confusing to read, and so I spent some time transferring over the information, and adjusting the essay to flow easier. 

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Advocacy Project Final Draft

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After I revised the first part of my essay, I started on the second part, which included the solutions, counterargument, and conclusion. I also hadn't created a works cited page for my first draft, so that was something I worked on my second draft. 

 

For researching solutions, I used the key words "colony collapse disorder" and "solutions," surprisingly, I found a few good sources. One of which was an article listing about four or five different solutions to CCP. This made researching so much easier because I now had an article that summarized different solutions as well as links to the sources of the solutions. I used the sources and got a lot of information about possible solutions and was able to write a lot about them. 

 

The counterargument part of the essay was more difficult to write about because there isn't a great deal of arguments against CCD. There was really only information about how CCD wasn't as big of a deal as some people make it out to be. I was able to discuss that argument enough. Finally, my conclusion was also pretty simple to do, as I simply restated the problem, briefly mentioned bee cognition, and wrapped it all up.

 

Writing my Works Cited page also wasn't too difficult, since the research database page at the library has a feature that cites the articles for you. I only had to do the bibliographies myself on a few sources.