I am naturally a pretty skeptical person and when I was introduced to pre-writing I was a bit unimpressed. I felt that the ideas of pre-writing were obvious and that I have been doing them for years. I was wrong.

I started my pre-writing exercise and realized half way through that I suck at pre-writing. It dawned on me that I almost always jump in to the argument/outline without laying out and exploring all the ideas first. I think this may be the reason that my papers always turn out mediocre. I realized this a bit too late to save this pre-writing assignment, but in the future I will definitely spend more time exploring ideas, concepts, and literature before jumping in to my argument. Hopefully this will lead to better, more interesting papers.

On a completely separate note, check out this very interesting video. In this video Daniel Gilbert talks about human happiness. Super interesting: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/97