Throughout English 1010 thus far, I can certainly say that my writing skills have been tested and tried. Writing for fun and composing rhetorical essays for a college-level English class are vastly different styles and require contrasting attitudes, voices, and points of view for each. Before writing essays of the former diction, I must admit that I did not understand the rhetorical strategies and had no idea there even was a rhetorical triangle. The assignments included in this portfolio show the advancements I have made in my writing with an academic tone.
While writing my summary and response for the essay “The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society” by Jonathan Kozol, I quickly became aware of my weaknesses with shortening and summarizing essays. Especially when trying to identify rhetoric, I tend to run on and have difficulty cutting out the extraneous and superfluous content. Luckily for me, that was the entire point of the assignment and I filed those skills away for the sake of my future writing career. When revisiting this piece, I found that there were certain sentences throughout that used opinion and have no place in a summary.
For some reason, the visual analysis assignment was by far my most difficult essay to finalize and compile into a
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That being said, other times you learn just as much from revising your work as you did from completing the initial assignment. Refining my rhetorical analysis was indeed an experience of both – troublesome and rewarding. Since my academic voice is somewhat similar to when I began this class, I decided to simply move and alter bits and pieces of the text. The biggest change was correcting the many instances where I use the wording “the audience,” rather than the actual, specific target audience of the paper. This helped me implement much better usage of my understanding of the rhetorical triangle. Adjusting wording and phrasing also bettered the
The comparative rhetorical analysis was my least stressful and favorite assignment since I get to compare for both reliable and unreliable sources. But, I had to plan out before typing this essay since I have to bring up the similarities and differences from those two sources than summarizing it. I was aware that I have to read this paper out loud in class which wasn’t a hard job to do since I’m reading off from my paper. I had an excellent grade on this essay than the other two assignments that I had to do for this project. And, I really enjoyed comparing two sources in one to give my personal opinion of what source I liked the most.
Knowledge is an effective factor in which human society relies on. Throughout history, those who were knowledgeable were well-respected, honored and revered. Author Jonathan Kozol writes his essay, “The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society,” to project the importance of knowledge and to explain that without it, one can suffer disastrous repercussions. He highlights real-life examples of how people suffer as a result of chronic illiteracy, and his entire essay is an advocacy for knowledge and literacy. Other authors such as Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright would use their personal experiences in completely different settings to highlight the power of knowledge. Douglass, a man born into slavery, and Wright, a man living through
I don’t consider myself a gifted writer by any stretch, but with practice I myself have noticed improvements in my own writing. When not writing essays for classes, my time spent writing dwindles down to mere text messages, emails, and tweets. However, since beginning this class, I noticed that I am no paying more attention to rhetorical strategy in my own and others writings. When I write for a topic now I take take a moment to identify all the rhetorical strategies I am employing and what I can do to maximize the potential to improve my argument.
Throughout the school year, we have written three rhetorical analysis essays, given feedback on the essays of numerous peers, and have looked through examples from the College Board and Ms. Slotten. Before the year began, I had absolutely no idea what a rhetorical analysis essay was. Now, I have received a score of eight on two of my practice essays. To say I have come a long way would be an understatement. After going through the rhetorical analysis marathon, my writing has improved in its quality as well as my understanding.
Kozol’s The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society, features a sufficient amount of examples that help readers to be thoroughly aware of the extent amount of struggles that illiterates face each day. Knowing that It has become common today to dismiss that illiteracy is not a worry in today’s society, seeing as many people assume that illiteracy is a problem of the past, and that living in a first world country voids us from an uneducated society, Kozol delivers a sufficient amount of examples to help inform others about the struggles that illiterates face every day. Not only are the examples beneficial for making readers aware of illiteracy, but he also demonstrates many of the problems that illiterates face. If Kozol did not write
In the past I had merely used summaries to help myself recall ideas and events in literature assigned for classes. I had also never thought that there could be types of summaries. I enjoyed writing in different styles when summarizing the TED Talk Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality, which was written as an explanatory summary which, according to the Blugold Guide, is a summary where “you repeatedly refer to the author of the work and indicate how the piece was organized through your choice of verbs and transition words” (Blugold Guide 55). Here is an example of my work: “In his 2017 TED talk, your brain hallucinates your conscious reality, Anil Seth opens his speech by examining what consciousness truly is. Seth starts by explaining the impact anesthetic has on your mind before and after surgery” (Rohloff 1). This clearly shows my ability to summarize using transitions and proper verbiage. This contrasts with my informative summary from Beware of the Leopard which was used to “capture in your own words the important ideas found in the source text” as shown here: “While the appeal of a website is vital to attracting users it often forces the benefit of user-friendliness to an inferior position. Many websites focus so much on glamor that the website fails to enhance the user’s experience rather than attract them to delve further” (Rohloff 1). These summarizing skills helped me move forward to write more complex pieces this
This essay is a reflective essay on my learning development from a young age through to my current position as a University Student. I will be relating my learning development back to two theories of human development, Vygotstsky’s socio-cultural theory and Marcia’s version of Erikson’s theory of identity development. I will identify and discuss the challenge I have faced with my identity and how this has impacted on my development.
In writing the following compositions, I find that I have grown significantly as a writer. Implementing new concepts with each assignment, and determining the proper methods of using rhetoric to affect the desired audience, has enhanced my communications abilities. Now, having the opportunity to go back to the start and revise each work, I am able to review and understand my progress. While the target audiences of the works I have written about are clearly stated in each of my essays, my audience is my professor, fellow students, and possibly academia at large.
Throughout my four years as a student at Marian High School, I have discovered that the English Department has been key to shaping my skills now and for my future endeavors. The courses seemed to alternate their focus between the fundamentals of writing a well-structured essay and how to effectively fill said essays with quality content. My first two years of English courses focused on the basics of each, essay-crafting and content, while my last two dove below the surface in each category. These courses have helped me discern that my future career lies within Communications—a (major) that requires precision of language and empathetic, convincing key points and supporting evidence. Each of these classes re-introduced and expounded upon concepts I have been taught since middle school. They have helped me to
In the second semester of Freshman English, I have progressed as a reader, and as a writer. Over the four units that we did over the semester, there were multiple sessions in each that helped me grow as a reader and writer. These sessions have taught me to do things that I did not know how to do before.
This class has taught me many skills that I will use in my future classes. In this communication and information literacy class I have learned about the writing process, citations, peer reviewed articles and more. When researching I should look for more reliable sources and to make sure the resources does not fake information. However, with all of this being said I still have a lot to learn especially when I am to write my essays.
During my time at Iowa State, I have not had very many classes that I have been able to say helped me develop as a person. I learn a lot from my classes and am able to use what I have learned – but very few classes actually change who I am. Because of this class, I have learned about racism and bias in the history of education and I am able to recognize that I did not incorporate diversity into my life prior to this class. It is not something that often crossed my mind because it has never been something I had to worry about as someone who is Caucasian. This class brought to my attention the issues that still surround race. It is especially apparent how it affects students who are simply trying to get an education. This class inspires me to learn more about diversity and what I can do to be an ally as well as what I can do in my future classroom.
In tenth grade, everyone in Mrs. D’s English class had to write an essay on an American author. No one was actually given a choice in the matter, nor was anyone allowed the option of choosing their author. That kind of option wouldn’t have meant much to me anyway, seeing as I, like many sophomores in high school, had no interest in anything even remotely intellectual. Fate’s ubiquitous hand dealt me Sherwood Anderson, a man I had never heard of (nor did I frankly care to know about). Despite the cliché one might expect at this point, research did nothing to change my apathy towards this essay. I wrote down the standard encyclopedic style biography that defined the efforts of most of my fellow classmates. After all of us were through
I feel I’ve met the objectives of the course well. I thoroughly understand my experiences with writing different from when I began; I discovered more about myself through analyzing my previous pieces, which I would’ve never thought to do outside of this course. My ability to read rhetorical situations has increased and I can apply my writing to these situations in a more sophisticated manner, as shown with my rhetorical analysis essay. I am aware of the differing inquiries that may be required when I encounter new rhetorical situations. Collaborating with my peers allowed me to better understand how I interpret others’ work and how others view my work. I’ve taken more risks in my writing in this course, as I was surrounded by unfamiliarity and how my instructors and peers from different parts of the world, instead of teachers following one set rubric for the entire course, with students of similar backgrounds and who knew exactly what was expected in their writing. Even with these risks, I do feel I increased my control of my situation-dependent writing, with help from the free-writing
I feel that the subject of English Language Arts is vital for a student to excel in. In previous English classes, the teachers gave multiple comparative essays, persuasive essays, personal anecdotes, reports about news articles, essays analyzing historical figures and events, and other assignments to their pupils to teach them the various forms of writing and how to improve their creative writing skills. Even with this teaching, I do hope to improve my persuasive writing since I prefer to keep papers relating to actual events or issues mostly objective and to not misrepresent the opposing argument or side of the story. I also hope to improve my vocabulary and my grammar, as neither as improved substantially. I feel that in the past my vocabulary was improving and expanding due to my frequent recreational reading, a habit I’ve abandoned in recent years. Books that I definitely enjoyed include The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Chasing Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson, SYLO by D.J. MacHale, and The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell. When reading The Book Thief, I ended up appreciating the novel more than I did initially. My favorite character was Death, mostly because of his moral dilemma even as a metaphysical entity and his cynical view of existence, which made him sympathetic yet slightly unlikable.