Extra Credit Blog Post

For my P2 paper, I chose to write to the U.S. Department of Education in regards to the cheating problem that is occurring in America. Sending my proposal to the US Department of Education was a little harder than expected and it took a little bit of time and research but I finally got it.  In order to send my proposal I had to do a little research about who exactly I should email it to as well as getting the email I needed.   The first thing I did was go to the US Department of Education’s website http://www.ed.gov .  Once I was there, I looked for anything that had en email or telephone number which i finally found in the top right corner under “Contact Us” and I thought I had found it. However all i did find, were telephone numbers, building address after building address for all types of departments, I even found the information to fax something which I have no idea even how to do but the one thing I did not find was any email address.  So, I went back to Google and made sure to add “email” into my seach engine and it eventually showed up.  So I copied the email onto my emails “send” section, attached my proposal, and under the subject box I wanted to write something that would capture their attention so I write “Ideas to reduce cheating and improve student education across the nation”.  Above my attache proposal, I added the sentence “Department of Education, if possible, please take the time to read this proposal for an idea to help reduce the amount of cheating going on in schools.  Sincerely Lauren Vohs”  and I clicked send.  While writing this paper and knowing I was going to send it to the Board of Education, I definitely took more time editing and revising this piece more than I usually do in regards to papers.  As I was editing this paper, I had a tough time making sure the Board of Education knew this letter was for them so eventually I decided to write in my paper “I am writing to you, US Department of Education” so they could get the clear understanding. I continued to edit this paper for quite sometime because if the Board of Education actually does decide to read it, that’s a pretty big deal but if you have mistakes in your proposal, then they won’t take you seriously so I wanted to make sure this was a well written, well thought out proposal incase they do decide to read it.  In my years of education, I have never written a paper in this type of format before and at first I really struggled with it- I kept wanting to do a five paragraph essay because that’s what I’ve gotten used to.  By the end of this paper, I could tell that this type of paper and style of it has helped me grow as a writer because it made me think outside the box and go out of my comfort zone.