Rhetorical Analysis
Our Rhetorical Analysis assignments we're all about taking what we'd read, deciphering the message in the story, and figure out what rhetorical writing element's the author used to convey their message. The man to the left is the legendary Coach Digby. Like an author it's his job to clearly convey messages and instructions to help our team succeed. And as an athlete and a leader on the team it was my job to understand and the restate his directions to others.
For example Coach can be tough and quite literally in my face because he knows that it will fire me up. However I can't relay his instruction the same way to my teammates because it'll make them nervous. Same Message, different tone.
While writing this essay was not as intense as a track meet, I was tasked to take the comical story "My Father Tried to Kill Me With an Alligator" and turn it into an academic paper that could clearly explain what the author's message was, why he used the methods he did, and whether or not his methods we're effective towards his target audience.
Click this link to access my Rhetorical Analysis Essay
file:///C:/Users/jaila/Downloads/Rhetorical%20Analysis%20Essay.pdf
My process in writing my rhetorical analysis essay was pretty straight forward. The main goal was to first identify uses of rhetorical writing and see which categories had the most or more importantly strongest examples. After deciding which rhetorical strategies i would write about, i began to craft my intro paragraph and my thesis. The thesis was a little difficult for me however. I had a general idea on what it was I wanted to write in was well as the examples I would use to support my claim. I just didn’t know how to put it on paper. So I wrote an intro paragraph, as very loosely put together thesis, and an outline for the rest of my ideas that would support the thesis once I finished it. During the consultation, I learned that I was struggling to write my thesis because I didn't fully understand the questions that i needed to answer within the essay. I went back and carefully reread the directions made sure to understand the questions and formulated a more coherent thesis statement based on what I already had. From there the process was streamlined, I simply needed to follow the examples I already had in my outline, expand on the ideas, and fully support my claims. After finishing my second draft i got ready for peer review. Those who peer edited my essay had a few common notes one of which being I still wasn't making a complete claim with respect to the question asked, and needed to revise my thesis again. I also got ideas from my own editing whether it was examples I overlooked that could make my own argument stronger or ways to make my writing style stand out more. In my final draft I didn't make any real major changes. I added what was needed to answer the question to completion and changes whatever grammatical errors and awkward phrasings were left. One of the main things I took from this was I don't dislike peer review nearly as much as I used to or thought I would going into this. Especially with the guidelines I knew what to look for in the essays and could offer much better feedback. I also don't hate rhetorical analysis essays as much as I used to, at least for this assignment. I think the main reason for that is that rather than reading speeches or persuasive essays I got to read and break down something short and comical making this a lot less strenuous and a little more fun.
Personal Narrative
This assignment was actually pretty difficult for me. The task was to use rhetorical writing elements we'd learned in a personal narrative that has some sort of message for the audience. While it's extremely easy to talk about casually about myself to others, I find it harder to write an academic paper about my own experience. I found myself bouncing from story to story, stressing over word count, did I have too little detail or too much. Oddly enough some advice I was given when I started learning the horizontal jumps came into play. I was always told, "Don't think, just go" and that's exactly what I did. Now that works triggering muscle memory but as for my essay I found myself with a word vomit of an essay that was way over the word limit. BUT at I finally had something and from there it was simply a matter of refining my work.
Click here to access my Personal Narrative:
file:///C:/Users/jaila/Downloads/Personal%20Narritive.pdf
file:///C:/Users/jaila/Downloads/Personal%20Narritive.pdf