As a student I have never been very interested in English classes, always feeling like the time we spent was mostly wasted, going over small grammatical changes and spelling. All of the English classes I have taken since my freshmen year of high school seemed to emphasize the same issues and topics. Other than small sections on poets and different types of poetry everything just seemed to be repeated year after year. Assignments are strict and have tight guide lines; analyze this and then relate it to this topic, or read this and summarize the story. There is little room for imagination and creativity in these assignments. However, English 101 has broken out of this mold of boring predictable English classes.

As a writer, I have always been in the middle of the pack. I have never been the best writer ever, getting A’s on all of my essays for writing skill and vocabulary; however I have also never been the worst writer out there. My writing is slightly above average, with few grammatical mistakes, largely due to spell check, and analysis’ that almost always go above expectations. When my writing really excels though is when I am able to write about something of my own choice, when I write about something that actually matters to me, something that I am generally interested in and something that is controversial. I am able to choose a side to a topic relatively easily once I have been told or I have read the facts. This allows me to argue topics well, which always makes writing better. This is what English 101 allowed me to do.

Instead of being given restrictive prompts on narrow topics, we were given general prompts. We were given the freedom to develop our own ideas and create arguments and essays that we are able to get behind. There is no way to half-ass an argument when you are given the freedom to argue exactly what you want to about a certain topic. This element of English 101 really allowed not only me but everyone else to improve their writing more than a traditional class would have. We are able to take our experience of arguing with passion in these essays and papers and apply the same writing style and enthusiasm to another topic that we may not feel as strongly about. Papers are no fun to read when it is clear that the writer is not invested in the topic, but if you can duplicate the passion and make the reader feel that the topic is actually of value to the writer, it makes for a much better read.  That is one of the best elements of the class, learning to write with passion, and then being able to emulate this passion for future assignments.

The assignments varied from week to week, however they were all connected to one of the major essays we wrote. One of my favorite blogs entries was “The Consumer I’ve Become”. This entry was one of my favorites because it really made me look at my consumption, and analyze how I was spending what little money I had. It helped me realize what has influenced me in the sense of consumerism throughout my life. I thought about the pros and cons of my buying patterns and how I could change what I was doing. In short, it was one of my favorites because it made me think and reflect on my past. If more assignments were like this, forcing me and other students to think back about their experiences, English would be more interactive and interesting.

This assignment also helped me analyze other parts of my life, not just my consumption habits. Much of my time is spend on the present, and the future. I am always focused on what I am doing and what I have to do, which is the case for most people. Doing this assignment helped me slow my life down. I look back to the past much more often, instead of worrying about what’s to come. There is so much to learn from the past, mistakes and accomplishments both must be analyzed to improve oneself. This is easily applicable to writing in multiple ways. Drawing from past experiences can improve the content of a paper, but also drawing from past assignments will make the assignment at hand and the ones in the future better. This is also one of the most important things I learned during this course.

“The Consumer I’ve Become” is different from other posts because it draws from my past. Many of the posts I have written are thrown together in the moment. I think about what I want to write, and the first idea that I come up with is what I go with. Much of the time, this first idea is slightly mediocre, but if I expanded on the idea and used my experiences with cases related to the idea, I can come up with an idea that excels well past the original.

Another of my favorite posts is the Ted Talk Draft. My original idea was to relate recycling with business, and of course that is what I started on right away. Without really thinking it all through I jumped in on the presentation, and before I knew it I had a mediocre slide show up on my blog ready to go. A few days later I began thinking about the Ted Talk Draft again. I thought about how I would try to find research on it, and how I would articulate my main argument. That was when I realized I was not particularly interested in the subject. I thought about just sticking with it for a while, but came to the conclusion that my final essay for the project would suffer greatly from the lack of interest. I tried to think of a way to change the idea, just tweak it to be more engaging not only for myself but for my audience as well, but to no avail. After thinking a bit more I decided to scrap the whole idea, and start over. I spent that night working on other homework and pondering the problem of finding a new topic. I finally arrived at an issue I felt interested and engaged in after a couple hours of thought. Marijuana had recently become legal, and there were many skeptics of the idea. I for one thought that legalization would help society in many ways, and felt that I could argue my side efficiently and effectively.

I started on a new presentation right away, taking my time and forming arguments for the legalization. I realized that many people are against smoking it and believe that it harms people who smoke and those around them. It would be hard work to convince these people that smoking marijuana is not harmful, that is when I came to my epiphany. If I used my argument to emphasize the benefits for all people, instead of just smokers, I would have a better chance at convincing my audience that legalization was the way to go. This is when I settled on the idea of marijuana legalization and its positive effects on the U.S. economy.

The reason the Ted Talk Draft was one of my favorites, if not my favorite, is because I am interested in the issue. I find it engaging and thought-provoking, with two clear, well formed, sides to the argument. The freedom we are given during this project is amazing; in a traditional class this topic would normally never be assigned even though it is currently a huge issue in modern society.

English 101 really helped me improve my writing skills. It helped me learn to write with passion and excitement, and taught me to always try to keep the audience interested and engaged. The reason this class was so successful at teaching me that was due to the freedom we were given. We were able to come up with our own ideas and we were encouraged to allow these ideas to grow and take over the paper instead of being restricted by prompts and guidelines. 

As we sat in class in early march we began talking about the invention mob. We felt that the main purpose of our invention mob clearly should be to bring people together. College is an experience, during which everyone is brought together, whether it is through classes, roommates, floor mates, or clubs and activities. I feel that many people take the opportunity to meet all these new people for granted. Washington State University is extremely diverse and we are lucky that this beautiful environment and campus draw people from all over the world. We figured that we should shed like on the extreme diversity at WSU.

            Blake came up with the idea that we should interview people, and ask them questions about where they are from. To take the project to the next level we figured we would have to show where everyone we met originated from. After some more brainstorming we decided we would make a poster with a world map and use something to show where people have come from.

            About a week later, Blake showed up with two large maps, about 3 feet by 2 feet. They were what we had been looking for. All of the countries and continents were outlined, without names of cities and countries cluttering the map. We then began working on how we would interview people. We had to start with coming up with what we wanted to ask everyone. We needed to be able to show how WSU brought people together and how other parts of the world varied from eastern Washington.

            Our first question was an easy one to figure out, “Why WSU?”. Everyone is at WSU for a reason, however very few of our reasons are the same. People come here for the veterinary sciences, for the engineering, for the hospitality. People come here because family and friends come here or because it is close to home. People come here just because they had nowhere else to go. Whatever the reason was, we wanted to know.

            Once students get here though, we wondered if they had been enjoying it. We decided not to ask them straight up whether or not they were enjoying it, due to the fact that people may just say no.  To get the some answers we desired we decided to phrase the question as this; “What is your favorite memory at WSU so far?” this way no one would start ragging on WSU in front of the camera.

            We decided that we needed to know less about WSU and more about where the interviewees were from. We wanted to hear about how it was different here. Thus the question “What are some cultural differences between here and your home?” came to be. This seemed to be a rather popular question, and we got a lot of answers for it. Some of them were funny, such as Muhammad’s quote about riding camels to school and Gary’s quote about the kangaroos in Australia.

            Finally we decided we wanted to know how people were dealing with being away from home. We wanted to ask “Is this your first time being far away from home? If so, how is it?” but we came across a couple cases where family had come with them to the States, so we also included the question “Did your family come with you?”.

            As we began the project we obviously started by filming ourselves. We did this with a web cam mounted on top of a computer. After recording the four of us, we made a wordpress blog with our purpose, method of persuasion and our first four videos. After ourselves, we started asking people on our dorms about where they were from and whether or not we could film them. At first we had a lot of success, but this was just on the floor that three of us live on. As we moved from floor to floor we noticed that people were less comfortable with being filmed. After going through the dorm, we headed outside. This presented a problem though. Until now we had been filming responses on the web cam; however taking the computer and camera outside did not sound like a very good idea. We made the decision to leave the computer and cam in the dorms, and just film responses using an iphone 5. We walked to the Intensive American Language Learning Center where we ran into a lot of people from the Middle East. Many were from Kuwait, with a few from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. After talking with these guys we headed towards the CUB, asking people along the way where they were from. We ran into a couple of Australians and Koreans, but still almost everyone refused to be filmed. As we continued up to the CUB we kept running into people from different places. Almost everyone we asked told us where they were from, so once we got to about 50 different places we figured we had gathered enough data. The next stages of Global WSU were to create the board with the map on it and edit the footage we had gathered.

            Because the map we had was about 3 feet by 2 feet, we figured we would look for a cork board about 3 feet by 3 feet so we could leave space for the title of the project. As we scoured Wal-Mart we had no luck finding a cork board large enough. Eventually we settled on two pieces of a type of foam and poster type material. The pieces were about 2.5 feet by 1.5 feet. We figured we would be able to connect the pieces to make a board about 2.5 feet by 3 feet, but this was much harder than I thought it would be. I started by just using super glue along the edges, however this was nowhere near strong enough to hold the boards together. As I sat in front of the boards staring at them, a friend came through and inquired about my project. He suggested using some sort of pin, and inserting a few of them into the middle of the side of the board and pressing the boards together. I found some paper clips that I straightened out and inserted into the boards. After applying about ten paper clips to one side, Austin and I pressed the two boards’ edges together. These improvised paper clip pins added just enough rigidity to make the project work. We then applied the map to the boards using sticky foam pads. We started going back through our data and colored in all the countries that we met people from. After coloring the countries, we placed tacks in roughly the places where their cities were. Each tack had the top of it colored red to make it more visible to viewers. We placed a fully red pin in eastern Washington to represent Pullman and WSU. After all of the tacks had been placed in their respective places, we used twine to connect all of the tacks back to Pullman. We used different colors of twine for different continents, running it from Pullman to the first city in a continent, on to the next city in that continent, and eventually back to Pullman. To finish the board off, we printed out black letters to spell “Global WSU!!” over the top of the board. We glued the letters on and traced them in red to make them “pop”.

            As the poster board was being made, Blake worked on the video. The idea was to group the videos together based on which question each interviewee answered. Sounded easy enough, but it turned out to be quite the ordeal. After a few failed efforts to edit the footage on a couple different programs, Blake found one that made it much easier. Starting with a simple title slide, the videos were grouped by the question answered, and ended with each person in the video saying who they are and where they’re from. Although the video is not perfect, it is quite close.

To begin the revisions to my invention mob essay I will start by identifying the main point of the essay. Currently the main point of my essay is to describe the the project and the steps we took to bring the project to life. I then need to analyze the rhetorical themes of the project. What choices did we make and why? What influenced these choices that we made? Other than these few things, I fell that my paper is strong, and that the only thing other than these is that it needs to be longer. I will expand the essay to as close to 2000 words as I can without making it long winded and boring.

Government attempts to control the use and production of marijuana have failed. The government has tried to use federal laws to prevent marijuana use for over half a century and yet marijuana is still used by over 25 million people a year. Cannabis is currently the largest cash crop in the United States, and marijuana is grown all over the planet. Claims that marijuana prohibition is making a difference in the war against drugs are far-fetched and unsupported by the facts, and the assumption that marijuana will be eradicated from the United States and other countries is ridiculous. It is no secret that the United States is running up a massive public debt, which is largely in part to the war on drugs. The public debt is the amount of money the U.S. government has borrowed and has yet to pay back. Debt increases as government spending is larger than government revenue. Currently the U.S. debt is getting close to $17 trillion. Traditional ways to decrease the deficit, or run a surplus, include cutting government spending and increasing federal taxes. However, there is one resource to produce revenue that the government is refusing to utilize, marijuana.

Since the 1920’s, marijuana has been illegal in the United States. It was classified as a schedule 1 drug in the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, along with MDMA, DMT, peyote, and heroin. Schedule 1 drugs are classified as such under three guidelines; “(A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse. (B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. (C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision” (Cornell). Despite numerous attempts at having marijuana removed from the list of schedule 1 drugs, it still remains there even though 18 states now allow marijuana to be prescribed by physicians to eligible patients.

The dangers of marijuana use have been exaggerated for almost a century and the modern scientific record does not support the “reefer madness” predictions of the past and present. Many claims of marijuana’s danger are based on old prejudices that originated in the 1900’s when scientists were not sure of the origins of the hallucinogenic properties of weed (News Medical). Since the cannabinoid receptor system was discovered in the late 1980s these hysterical concerns about marijuana’s dangerousness nature have not been confirmed with modern research. Everyone agrees that marijuana, or any other drug use such as alcohol or tobacco use, is not for adolescents. However, adults have proved over the last several decades that pot can be used reasonably without damaging impacts to the individual or society, in fact many believe marijuana even has medicinal value.

Marijuana is too costly for our justice system and should instead be taxed to support useful government programs. Law enforcement has more important responsibilities than arresting three quarters of a million people a year for marijuana possession, especially given the additional justice costs of disposing of each of these cases (Flister). Marijuana arrests make justice more expensive and less efficient in the United States, filling up jail space, jamming up courts , and diverting time of law enforcement agencies, attorneys, judges, and corrections officials away from violent crime, the sexual abuse of minors, and terrorism. In a recent article by the Huffington Post, it was calculated that the legalization of marijuana could save the United States government at least $14 billion a year (Huffington). Even after the fact of saving $14 billion, taxation of marijuana sales could provide a substantial source of revenue, which could be used for education, the criminal justice system, or social programs.

A regulated, legal market in marijuana would reduce marijuana sales and use among teenagers, as well as reduce their exposure to other drugs in the illegal market. The illegality of marijuana makes it more valuable than if it were legal, providing opportunities for teenagers to make easy money selling it to their friends. If the excessive profits for marijuana sales were ended through legalization there would be less incentive for teens to sell it to one another. Legalized marijuana would also reduce the flow of money from the American economy to international cartels and criminal organizations. Marijuana’s illegality makes foreign cultivation and smuggling to the United States extremely profitable, sending billions of dollars overseas into the black market while diverting funds from productive economic development.

Weed is not only used recreationally. Marijuana’s legalization would simplify the development of hemp as a valuable and diverse agricultural crop in the United States, including its development as a new bio-fuel to reduce carbon emissions and a new structural material (Meredith). Canada and European countries have managed to support legal hemp cultivation without legalizing marijuana, but in the United States opposition to legal marijuana remains the biggest obstacle to development of industrial hemp as a valuable agricultural commodity. As the United States energy policy continues to embrace and endorse the development of bio-fuels as an substitute to oil dependency and a way to decrease carbon emissions, it is all the more important to develop industrial hemp as a bio-fuel source – especially since the use of hemp stalks as a fuel source will not grow demand and prices for food, such as corn or wheat. Legalization of marijuana will greatly simplify the regulatory burden on prospective hemp cultivation in the United States.

Marijuana has positive qualities, besides the benefits for the economy, such as its medicinal value and its use as a recreational drug with relatively mild side effects, or none at all. Many people use marijuana because they have made a knowledgeable decision that it is good for them, especially Americans suffering from a variety of serious ailments. Marijuana provides relief from numerous symptoms including pain, nausea, spasticity, and other symptoms for many persons who have not been treated effectively with conventional medicines. Many adults around the world prefer marijuana to the use of alcohol as a mild and reasonable way to release stress. Americans use marijuana because they make the decision to, and one of the reasons for that choice is their personal observation that the drug has a moderately low addiction problem and easy-to-manage side effects. Most cannabis users develop tolerance to many of pot’s side effects, and those who do not, often choose to stop using the drug. Marijuana use is the result of informed consent in which individuals have decided that the benefits of use outweigh the risks, especially since, for most Americans, the greatest risk of using marijuana is the relatively low risk of arrest.

Marijuana is not a lethal drug. It is safer than alcohol and tobacco. It is established scientific fact that marijuana is not toxic to humans; marijuana overdoses are nearly impossible, and marijuana is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or tobacco. It is unfair and unjust to treat marijuana users more harshly under the law than the users of alcohol or tobacco. Marijuana users are determined to stand up to the injustice of marijuana probation and accomplish legalization, no matter how long or what it takes to succeed. Despite the threat of arrests and a variety of other punishments and sanctions marijuana users have persisted in their support for legalization for over a generation. They refuse to give up their long quest for justice because they believe in the fundamental values of American society. Prohibition has failed to silence marijuana users despite its best attempts over the last generation. The issue of marijuana’s legalization is a persistent issue that, like marijuana, will simply not go away. Marijuana will be legalized because marijuana users will continue to fight for it until they succeed

Works Cited

“21 USC § 812 – Schedules of Controlled Substances.” 21 USC § 812. Cornell University, n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2013.

Bradford, Harry. “14 Ways Marijuana Legalization Could Boost The Economy.” The Huffington Post 7 Nov. 2012: n. pag. Print.

“Cannabinoid Receptors.” Cannabinoid Receptors. News Medical, n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2013.

Flister, Larrissa D. “The Economic Case for Marijuana Legalization in Canada.” Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences 5.1 (2011): n. pag. Print.

Meredith, James, Richard Ebsworth, Stuart R. Coles, Benjamin M. Woods, and Kerry Kirwan. “Natural Fibre Composite Energy Absorption Structures.” Composites Science and Technology 72.2 (2012): n. pag. Print.