Emily Tym ENG 111 Xu Li Decemeber 4th, 2013

To Future Professors, Bosses, Managers, etc., When you think about it, writing can be a very stressful, thought provoking process that takes a lot of much needed time. What I have learned over the years is that I cannot sit down and write a paper and call it a day. It takes multiple times of writing, reading, editing, adding, and deleting information to make it sound like something I am proud of. The revision process is a lot more than reading over your work once; it requires one to read and reread, as well as, take a break and come back with a fresh look. When I take a break from writing, it allows my thoughts and ideas a chance to refocus and continue forming. Then, when I feel reenergized, I can start with a fresh look and incorporate my new ideas with the already existing ones. Looking back on my essays, the area of focus that has improved the most is how and where to use the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos within my essays. Entering ENG 111, I knew from the title of its course, Composition and Rhetoric that the main focus was going to be writing papers, in addition to learning new ways to improve our writing. The first day of class, my graduate teacher, Xu Li, told us that this course "is designed to teach you [us] the rhetorical skills you need to compose, revise, and critically analyze persuasive texts both within in the university and in the wider world. The course emphasizes rhetorical inquiry and

Tym 2 invention, promoting critical questioning, and researching" (Syllabus). From previous years of writing, I remember that writing hasn't been one of my strengths. My teachers comments on my essays stated that the area of focus needed to be clearer, organize sentence structure that is understandable to the audience, as well as, my ability to analyze for key components, such as why the author included certain details and not others. Keeping this is mind I really wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to improve my writing skills. With many weeks of writing, analyzing, reading, proof reading, and editing, I hadn't realized how much it takes to improve a paper. As I reflect over my essays over the English 111 course, I can look at how my writing processes may have changed and how my writing has been influenced by the course. In almost all of the essays that we were asked to write, it seemed necessary to include some type of rhetoric as evidence and as a means of analyzing pieces of work. In the beginning of the course, I was not confident in my ability to use these strategies. However, looking back, it seems as if I was able to progressively learn how to use them in their appropriate contexts. For example, in one of the earlier essays, we were asked to analyze either a piece of text or media and then write a rhetorical analysis the described the meaning behind it. For this assignment, I chose to analyze the Sarah McLachlans Animal Cruelty commercial. My decision to find meaning behind this piece was in part because it is a relatively known commercial that many people have seen and because; whenever people see this on their t.v screens, they seem to become somewhat emotional. In the beginning of analysis process, I had a hard time figuring out what my intentional argument was. It took

Tym 3 multiple times of reading, rereading, and editing to finally come up with a main idea and area of focus. I decided to determine what it was about the video that created an emotional connection with the audience. However, because of numerous amounts of emotional connections made within and throughout the video, I decided to determine what it was about the video that created an emotional connection with the audience and center my paper on the emotional tones. With this in mind, my paper continued to talk about the different ways Sarah McLachlan and the author created the video to bond with the audiences emotional side, such as the large amount of pathos used, style analysis, tone, syntax, and the use of a popular song artist. While I may have been able to analyze for specific aspects of pathos, my use of analysis didnt seem specifically clear the first time around. Once my peers and teacher read the essay, I was able to clearly see what needed to be fixed and for what purposes. Being able to revise, I was able to organize my thoughts more clearly to incorporate a better analysis of each emotional element. Although I might have struggled the first time around of using rhetorical analysis (pathos, ethos, and logos), I believe that with continued time and effort, I was able to learn how to correctly use them in analyzing for meaning. This can be seen in my research paper. The focus of this paper was to research a specific world issue that is going on, pick a side, and provide factual evidence to support our argument. Being an ongoing and reoccurring topic around the world, I decided to research about the unhealthy choices in schools. My focus wasnt solely centered around the idea of obesity, but on the idea of whether or not government programs and schools should regulate what is allowed to be sold during the school day,

Tym 4 primarily in the vending machines. In this paper, because I had a better understanding of rhetorical analysis, I was able to include a number of sources that supported my ideas and thoughts, as well as, I was able to decipher its meaning without repeating what they had said. For example, I pointed out that, Because vending machines are filled with unhealthy foods children tend to gravitate their cravings towards these types of foods instead of one with more nutrient dense fixations. Then, to support my statement, I referenced The Journal of Adolescent Health, that stated, The school environment is one important influence that plays a significant role in teaching and modeling eating behaviors to children. This evidence or support, the ethos, helped back up my argument that I had previously stated in my thesis. From the beginning of the course to this point in time, I can see a large change in my understanding about writing and in my writing style. Each essay that we were asked to write had a specific focus that had the intention of teaching us new ways of writing to help us further improve. I hope that these new guidelines and ways of incorporating these specific aspects we learned throughout the course stay with me, as I will need them for future writing assignments both in courses and further employment opportunities.