Welcome to my digital English Critical Thinking Portfolio!
This collection showcases my development as a reader, writer, and critical thinker throughout the semester.
Here you'll find selected essays, drafts, and some of the papers we worked on.
My Academic Essays
Click to read the full essay, drafts, and reflections.
This paper looks at Jonathan Rauch’s argument that getting rid of all prejudice by enforcing rules is risky and futile. He talks about intellectual pluralism, which is having an open system where people face down offensive or prejudiced ideas in debates, not by silencing them with censorship. The main point is that letting authorities ban offensive speech creates fear, limits learning, and can lead to a slippery slope of censoring based on what's subjective, harming freedom in society.
This paper looks at Stephen Jay Gould's unique writing style and how he defends making science more accessible- or what he calls "vulgarization." He shows how using personal tales and links to culture can fight against biological determinism and question pure scientific objectivity. While his cultural tangents might sometimes sidetrack readers, his person-focused method does a great job of linking hard data with our wider human experience.
This paper looks at how Victorian science used numbers, averages, and neat categories to mirror what society wanted, not always objective truths. It points out how biological determinism was really popular back then, stating that traits like intelligence and chances of being criminal were set from birth. In essence, the text claims that Victorians ignored individual differences to hide social biases under the mask of science.
