I was pretty good at citing sources and synthesizing them coming into this class. My high school teacher had spent a lot of time with us on not writing 5- paragraph essays. We also wrote a lot of essays based on argument, synthesis and rhetoric. However, I did still learn some valuable skills in this class. I learned about how to better my quote sandwiches and really build my argument around them. More importantly, I learned to never start a paragraph with someone else’s ideas. Instead, I would start with a claim of my own, and add in the quote that supports or denies that claim. This greatly helped to strengthen my argumentation and papers overall. I really enjoy synthesis writing because I feel like when I can use other people’s voices, especially those more authoritized than myself, I can really persuade my reader even better. In class, we learned to do just this, but to make sure that our voice is the one that is heard and that anyone else’s voice that we used was just there for support.