If you’re reading this right now from the future attending this class, chances are it’s the end of the semester and you have stumbled upon this page.

Based on my experience, I can tell you that this class will be hard to get used to at first. I’ve had my ways of thinking challenged, my assignment planning and time management were put to the test. This class was hard work, no doubt about that. But, I suppose my takeaway was that I need to think more carefully about what I read. I often always picked up on things but during discussions, I found that the message that a story is trying to convey to me is deeper than what I initially found. You’re going to be doing a lot of analysis, and this may be you in my position. But, don’t worry too much about it. That is what class discussions are for.

When you come to this class, you’re going to hear a lot about rhetorical elements. We choose our audience, the method in which we write our responses is our genre, why we write is our purpose, our opinion on the topic is our stance, the way we format our writing is the design, and the reason behind our written reactions is the exigence. I have taken these into consideration when working on my pieces. Some of these elements were new ideas that took a bit of time to fully understand but once I got the hang of it, I was able to fully weave these elements into my writing and reflect on them in the reflection papers. You may have learned about course learning objectives by now and how there are 9 of them that we are expected to meet. There actually weren’t 9 CLOs in the past. I guess you could put it this way: the class I’m in, as of writing this served as guinea pigs, testing this new objective. You’ll find all 9 of them once you go through this portfolio site if you need a refresher.

My writing was a little rusty at first, which was normal for me since I was on summer vacation (and out of high school, of course), and I remember struggling quite a bit when the semester started. My organization was off and overall, I wasn’t as descriptive with things as I could have been. But as I went through the course material and was being assigned multiple writing assignments, I found myself regaining the skills I had once forgotten. My analyses are detailed, I regained the ability to tell a decently gripping narrative, and I was able to incorporate sources and interpret them to support my stance. Going back to the topic of rhetorical elements, let’s say you were to change one of them while you were writing. Let’s say you wrote on a sheet of paper instead of on a Word document or if you were to change your stance on a topic. The other elements do change. Sure, still have something that prompted you to react, you still have some sort of design, you have your stance and you have your purpose for writing as well as your targeted audience. It depends on what’s being changed. Something like media wouldn’t affect things at all but the stance is another matter. You have a different audience to target, you have a different design, so on and so forth. Just something to keep in mind.

I am a college freshman at the moment, this is my first college experience. It was all entirely online, which isn’t something I or a lot of people aren’t used to by now. By the time, you’re reading this, I’m probably on campus (this still feels weird to go back to, even now to be honest). This class was conducted on addressing certain matters throughout the world and throughout history, at times and this was all leading up to debunking a single story. A single story on culture, race, beliefs. In other words, incomplete views on certain groups of people, that are perpetuated by mainstream media and spread through word of mouth.

If you made it this far, then thank you for taking the time to review this. Please feel free to look around and I hope that you take away something as an idea for your own projects.

Best of luck
-Jeremiah