Dr. Albert Mehrabian found that communication is made of 55% body
language, 38% tone, and 7% of the words we use. Because of this, the words I use and the way I use them is vital in writing. Through my journey in first year writing, I learned about five main Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) of writing skills that are necessary to compose complex pieces in various mediums. With the aid of course content, I learned the purpose of each SLOs and practiced them regularly.
Rhetorical knowledge uses audience and context awareness to create
text that is appropriate for any situation. This is learned by analyzing various types of texts in different genres, to find ways to improve my writing style. One of the first assignments of the semester was to analyze Martin Luther King Jrs Letter from Birmingham Jail. This assignment allowed me to see how King used his situation of being incarcerated for pushing his argument, as pathos to evoke the consciousness of the audience. I implement this idea in my activism project by using my experiences of discrimination as a center point of my research. The purpose of the website was to persuade the reader to not be prejudice towards immigrants, and to inform my audience with multiple accredited articles that support my argument. I used context and audience awareness throughout many of my other forums, studios, and projects, implementing the rhetoric knowledge Ive learned throughout the course. In the future, I will use rhetorical knowledge in my everyday life by analyzing what messages the author intended me to see.
To properly understand how authors use their rhetorical knowledge, I
needed to learn how to critically read. This involves being able to pinpoint ideas from information and texts, which I demonstrated in my critical inquiry project, while selecting appropriate sources for my research. The sources I picked needed to coincide with my groups issue of racial discrimination in rural towns. While evaluating whether my articles were credible and had solid evidence, I also had to pick the correct sources that would support my purpose effectively. Reading critically is a skill that I use with any reading that is assigned to me or any research I am required to do in my academic career. This skill will help me gain the knowledge I search for from other writers, while becoming a more adept writer myself.
Writing a successful paper is not a singular step, but instead a process
of conceptualizing, developing, and finalizing. Some of these steps will have to be repeated once revision is made. For example, my first paper in this course was to analyze a paper I wrote, then write an essay on my critical readings for it. The Composing Process SLO was used to produce an adequate final paper. Using my rhetorical knowledge and critical reading skills, I took notes and made drafts of how I wanted to present my findings. Once I had a draft that I had revised and edited, I had peers revise my work to give outside insight to further my revisions. The final product was a polished piece that was heavily revised by my peers, my professor, and myself. Throughout, I had to change and sometimes completely throw out ideas, so my message came across as effectively as possible. This process was done extensively for this project, repeating the steps multiple times. In other papers, forum posts, and any other writing I produced for the course, I preformed the same composing process in smaller doses, depending on the importance of the assignment.
Each genre and type of literature has guidelines to how to style,
organize, and document the writing produced. The only way to become comfortable with a medium is to have experience with it. For the activism project and final portfolio, I had to create a website to house all my work. A good predecessor for these assignments was studio 5 which was centered around digital composition. This studio aimed to teach us of different marketing strategies and ways visual formatting attracts the audience. With the information learned in studio 5, I formatted my websites to be as digestible as possible for the viewer. Another aspect of knowing how to use a genre is the grammatical and structure I use in my writing. With my rhetorical knowledge of knowing my audience, I selected the correct discourse community for my medium.
Using the SLOs, I have a wide knowledge on how to effectively
produce a piece that targets my audience, with appropriate information and language use. Appling this knowledge uses critical reflection, which is the ability to demonstrate the feedback and information gained from a process, in writing. My portfolio was an example of this reflective ability; taking a wide selection of all the assignments and work done in this course and reflecting on how they connect to the SLOs. This act of informational communication is also being shown by this essay. I have summarized the course content and applied it to each of the Student Learning Outcomes aimed to be gained by first-year writing students. Overall the SLOs are a useful tool that help brainstorm and finalize successful pieces of writing that practice audience awareness and structure. I harnessed these skills throughout the semester and will continue to use them in any form of writing I use in the future.