Self Analysis Post

Hello again bloggers…
It has been a great journey telling you all about the different aspects of the drinking age and informing you all about my opinions on it. This has been a great experience for me because I feel that this form of writing has helped expand my writing expidentures. Not only did I get to write in a brand new way I also feel as if blogging about the debate on the drinking age helped to improve my argumentative writing skills.
When my professor first gave me this assignment to pick a controversial topic and blog about it, I was a bit hesitant. My initial response was, “What the heck how do I even blog and how is this going to aid me in writing about the drinking age?” Little did I know how interesting it would be to complete this assignment. In addition, I feel that blogging has many unknown benefits that I never truly knew about. One benefit that specifically helped me grow with my topic was the direct connection with other bloggers. I found it extremely helpful to hear their feedback on my blog posts, and have them bring up questions and topics that I had not thought about before. Therefore, this caused me to have even deeper thinking with my topic.
I chose the topic of the drinking age because I have always felt passionate about this issue, but as I continued to research this topic my reasons for being so passionate and actual knowledge about the topic strengthened and diversified immensely. Originally I believed that the drinking age should be lowered because I figured if you are 18 and can fight and die for your country why can’t you have a beer in a bar? Along with this common reasoning I believed in others such as being able to buy cigarettes, one can be put in jail at age eighteen, etc., but do not get me wrong I still believe these are extremely valid arguments I just expanded these arguments with my research. Now I feel that the most important reason as to why the drinking age should be lowered is to help decrease bad drinking habits and the amount of overall deaths from activities such as binge drinking.
Not only did I state my opinion of the argument through this whole blogging process, but I also learned about the other side of the debate and somewhat sympathized with what they believe in. Having to write two different blog posts a week allowed me to cover every aspect possible about drinking. From this journey I discovered the psychological aspects of drinking (why younger people want to drink and what causes alcohol dependency), as well as general facts and statistics that I had never truly known about before. I got the opportunity to learn about other groups that are in favor of lowering the drinking age to eighteen such as Choose Responsibility and the Amethyst Initiative. I also heard the voice of the opposing side in favor of keeping the drinking age at twenty-one with groups such as MADD. In addition to covering different aspects of my topic I was able to form my own theories and ideas about what would happen if this debate would have no end, and predict what the future would hold. This whole blogging process has been a long one folks, but I do believe that it has been a beneficial one as well. I feel as if I have a whole new respect for bloggers/blogging, and I have been able to fully connect with my topic because of it. It is also extremely convenient to be able to connect my newfound knowledge/research via hyperlinks in my blog posts! So if anything I have learned how to make hyperlinks J just kidding, but on a more serious note I want to thank all of you for leaving me comments and helping me consider new angles to my argument