ENGL 298 B: Intermediate Writing Social Sciences   Autumn 2011, University of Washington

In my proposal, I was way too broad. I had wanted to focus on Goldman’s central idea of freedom from all authority. Later in the proposal I had thrown out some ideas to maybe focus on, and one of which was religion. After getting my feedback, I decided to write the dialogue on whether or not a person could be considered free while worshiping their god ,or gods in Socrates’ case.

As soon as I started the dialogue, it was pretty easy to keep it going. The ideas just kept flowing and bouncing off of each other. To make sure I stayed on topic, at the top of each page I had to write what the focus of my paper was to make sure I wouldn’t stray too far. I wanted Goldman to almost use the Socratic method against Socrates, to kind of undermine him and his credibility. But that didn’t come out the way I had anticipated at first, she just seemed to be badgering him over and over with a bunch of questions. It took a while for her to actually get into her own arguments and not just question Socrates on his. The rest of the dialogue went pretty smoothly, except I wasn’t really sure how to end it, so I just kind of put some abrupt ending to get it over with. But the feedback I’ve received thus far has been pretty positive about the conclusion of the dialogue, so it worked out unexpectedly well.