at times

one thing i did as a poli science major was pick out ONE phrase to base my whole arguement upon. in doing so, i often received low grades on my papers and i had no idea why. was i missing the greater points? was i missing something more important? was i taking each word literally instead of recognizing that the author was simply thoroughly covering both sides? i had no idea at the time what i was doing wrong, b/c i thought my writing was infallible. my grades will tell you otherwise. in my writing classes, i wasn't so involved in aruging, so it was a different story. (with the grades, of course that's most important.)