Reflection #2

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  • #339

    The type of writings that I have learned to do this semester are a whole different than what I did back in High School. This is the first time that I have written a rhetorical essay where I had to explain certain parts of an article, magazine, newspaper etc. I am used to getting questions and answering them based on a reading where the answer is either a yes or no where there is only one right answer or you had to compare 2 or more things according to an article. My understanding about rhetorical terms has started this semester. I’ve never really heard of any type of rhetorical terms and this is the first time I am learning about them. In my other classes, I do not have to write any essays or long writings. I get questions in my other classes for example in my psychology class I get 5 questions per homework and have to answer them based on the book of the class. I do not have to apply what I learn in my English class to my other classes. In my first writing, as I did my research and reading I kept looking for the rhetorical terms that were needed for my essay. I kept looking for keywords that were associated with them. Also I used a sample essay to organize my own essay into the format that it is.

    #341
    REAYANUL HAQUE
    Participant

    I have learned about rhetorical analysis and all the terms of it. I used those terms back in high school but not in detail. I never did a research paper with rhetorical analysis so it was kind of challenging for me to put together my thoughts and research to get good writing. I learned how to organize my writing. I have also learned how to connect the analysis with the evidence which I never did before. I connected the reading and also implied the main ideas into the writing which helped me to develop my writing a lot better.

    #343
    Sabrina Persaud
    Participant

    <p class=”p1″><span class=”s1″>I’d say I’ve been exposed to the aspects of rhetorical terms since middle school (purpose, tone, audience, etc) but I’d never been introduced to the concept of rhetorical terms as a whole. The majority of my writing in high school revolved around using rhetorical devices to explain / answer a question. This was the first time that “rhetoric” was defined as a conversation of persuasion to me; I hadn’t thought of it like that before. The writing is different in the sense that I’ve always refrained from sentences like “The tone of this passage is ….”, “The author’s stance is …”, “The purpose of this article is ….”. I think this is one of the few times when the writing had to be very straightforward. It’s challenging because I feel like I’ve always been taught that<span class=”Apple-converted-space”>  </span>that particular way of writing was “wrong” even though I know it’s not. I feel like my understanding of rhetorical terms hasn’t changed as much. I’ve always seen it as a bunch of factors intertwined together to make a bigger picture, but I think sometimes it can be difficult to really see the difference between some of the terms. Writing my source based essay made me realize that I had trouble separating stance and tone just because they really go hand in hand together. After writing and revising the paper, the differences and similarities of each term are very clear. My writing process wasn’t as organized as I think it should’ve been now that I’ve done the first paper. I was frustrated at some points, and at others I had a clear vision of what I had to do. The assignment requires a lot of time, patience, and understanding which I did have – but I don’t think it was enough. I hope to see that change as the class progresses, and I think it will. </span></p>

    #345
    Mohammed Mia
    Participant

    What I have learned in writing so far this semester similarly relates to the types of writing I’ve done all throughout high school. As we started off writing a rhetorical analysis essay in this semester, I was pretty familiar with it because that is all I did in my senior year of high school in AP Literature. My understanding of the rhetorical terms I’ve learned since the beginning of the semester has not changed much. For some of the terms, I was introduced with a different definition and learned how that term is analyzed about an article regarding it’s new definition. For example, I always knew what stance meant, but implementing that into the rhetorical analysis was something new I had to do and successfully analyze the author’s stance upon the question. In other classes like philosophy, I’ve encountered many kinds of reflection writing pieces to be completed regarding the book we were supposed to read and answer the questions the professor has asked us to answer in class.  Additionally, in USSO, I’ve had to do one analysis paper of the types of people living back then. It was about the people being in favor of certain rules/regulations and analyzing the difference in gender roles from then to now. Then, it came time to write my first English essay in college. I was a bit overwhelmed when I heard it had to be 7 pages long, but with a step by step plan, I was able to do it. So many thoughts were racing through my mind. I mainly used the student examples from the class website to try and mimic the layout that the student had because it was nice and organized. That was a problem I feel I had because I had to do an analysis of four different sources with different rhetorical terms given to us. This process got me to understand that in writing, the one time you write something down is only the beginning. I tried to make it a one and done piece of writing to just get over it but I realized that wasn’t possible.

     

    #348
    salwa rahman
    Participant

    What I have learned in this class so far is very similar to what I have learned before taking this class. What I find different in this class is how we have more independence in a sense where we can choose what topic to write about. For example, in this class we chose our own topics and wrote a source-based essay on it recently. In my past experience, I have not  had this type of freedom, as I was normally given specific topics to conduct research on. My understanding of rhetorical terms has not changed, but it did expand to some extent. I learned more about genre and how to describe a source’s genre. However, I did know about the other rhetorical terms such as stance and purpose since I learned about this in high school. In my other classes, I did not have to use different sources or conduct research. For my theater history class, I had to write a paper in which I would place myself into the time period of a certain ancient Greek/Roman play. I then had to use direct quotes from a text book to express how well I understood its content, along with quotes from the play. In my Psychology class, I was given a detailed outline and I basically was prompted to answer the (several) listed questions which were on the outline. In these cases, I didn’t have to use what we learned in class. I used my own prior knowledge on certain aspects such as formatting and citing sources. The process of writing my first essay was, I must say, not as difficult as I thought it would be. I ended up writing it in the span of 2-3 hours, because I had all my sources already picked before I started writing. I modeled my essay after one of the other source-based essays that were posted, and I ended up making it my own. I felt as though I did a thorough job of teaching myself and readers of the topic I was researching, which is deforestation. This process did not greatly affect my  understanding of writing, but  I did begin to understand that not everything is to be taken so personally; research is meant to be objective, and it is also meant to provide facts and supporting evidence. I learned to lay low on providing my own  opinion in this essay, and to further explore the topic I was writing about.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by salwa rahman.
    #353
    Arijit Saha
    Participant

    The type of writing I did in this paper was not similar to anything I did back in high school. I learned about the term rhetorical analysis in college. In high school I wrote essays about the central idea and the tone. I wasn’t familiar with all the rhetorical devices from this paper. This type of paper was something new to me and I enjoyed writing it and I also faced some difficulties, for example my biggest problem was putting down my thoughts together and organizing them. But I think this paper improved my writing style and I learned better ways of organizing my writings from feedbacks and examples. I liked my research topic alot and I got to know more about saving the environment as well as facts about electric power and how it is the way to the future.

    #355
    Wyatt Kuebler
    Participant

    I have never heard of or learned about rhetorical terms, so the entire first paper was a very confusing time for me. I did learn how to use the libraries database to look up different kids of sources, making my paper easier than it would have been otherwise. This is currently the only class where I am learning anything new and it is somewhat exciting as school has never really challenged me before. I’m high school I would have been 1.) given all of these sources and 2.) told to prove my argument on the topic. This differs greatly from the paper we just wrote and even as challenging as it was, it was nice to write something different for a change. This type of paper showed me a new way to analyze my work as well as others and added a different perspective to how people write. Starting from having no prior knowledge on how to write a paper on rhetoric, the process was a bit rocky towards the beginning but once I understood what that mean it made writing the paper a lot easier. I discovered that my goal was not to prove a point or anything like that, but instead my goal was to explain his explanation of a topic and how he went about doing it. This form of writing isn’t difficult but it is still new to me and I have some getting used to.

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