Final reflection on two rhetorical terms

The most important rhetorical terms to me are purpose and audience. Purpose will allow me to state what information I want to share to my audience. They are strongly bonded. If I chose the wrong audience, no matter how convincing I am, they will not take the information seriously. Therefore, choosing audiences is important when we show our purpose in the essays. One example is that I really wanted to talk with someone about things that I found out interesting. I tried talking with a friend who does not understand the topic and they were in confusion and seem disinterested. In here, my purpose is to share information and get feedback from the discovery I found. The audience was someone who does not understand the topic that I share. The disinterest is the feedback that tells me choosing audience can be an important information. I talked to my brother about my discovery, and he gave me a more positive and active feedback. He seemed interested in the topic that I was talking about, and he understands some degree about the topic. Similar to a presentation that I listened in class, I heard that some people are very stubborn and does not listen to the feedback that other people give them. I tried talking to someone who came up to me for feedback on what should they do if they have an abusive boyfriend. I told them to break up or let their boyfriend know that they are making them feel bad, but they never did. This is also similar to picking the wrong audience. Audiences who will not take your information or purpose seriously will not give you good feedbacks. Therefore, choice of audience is very important.

MID-TERM REFLECTION

When I was introduced with the terms of rhetorical situation, I developed a better understanding with author’s writing and purposes. The rhetorical situations create a clearer image for me, and I was able to analyze the texts better. One example is that I know the genre of the piece is magazine. Given that the text is magazine, I was able to tell the interaction between the author and the audience. Most magazines are created to share broad and fast information of a specific topic, so we know that the magazines are for people who are interest readers of a specific topic. We can analyze the interaction between the author and the audience better based on knowing the genre of the text. Compare to the essays I wrote in high school, most of my essays were written just to analyze a specific quote and the situation. They usually include a lot of personal opinions and debate in the texts. There was no analysis between author and audiences, and they usually have a bias view on the topic. Tone and purpose can be well connected together. Given that the tone is a neutral and formal, we were able to tell that the purpose of the author has limited bias or view on the topic. They will not usually include personal view on the topic, and they will be most likely to inform the audience about a specific topic. Compared to high school, I didn’t utilize much about tone in my essays. I usually just state the purpose of the author and try to find quotes that suit to the analysis. I think it is a very good thing to utilize tone in purpose analysis. I’ve learned a lot about how to write a source-based essay and analyzing text in a more advanced way. 

Post-Essay Reflection (after the completion of Inquiry-based essay)

            The purpose of my essay was to do research on the topic about going to College. I have friends who did not go to college and are still doing well in their life. The inquiry question was “Is college really worth it?”. It can be an article for high school students and people who are interested in research about college. I have learned that data is very important when I try to do research on a certain inquiry question. It provided me with a guide to make educational interpretations and ideas to write my essays. Something that I have learned when I did not know in August is that I did not know a small topic can be separated into multiple smaller parts. For example, in my inquiry topic, I was able to talk about financial statuses and mental health of the students. Even though my topic mainly focuses on whether or not to go to college. I find that there are a lot of things to write about something very simple. Maybe it was because my inquiry topic can be argumentative. I have also learned that writing essays sometimes requires a lot of logic interpretation. Even though literacy is art, we require good logic in order to make good analysis. The analysis has to make sense in order to be a good analysis.

            The audience of my topic was aimed at high schoolers, and students who are worried about college. The reason for this is that there are a lot of high schoolers being super competitive and stressed about their grades, to the point which might make them less social. The language is English, and the tone of my essay is mildly formal. A lot of high school students are worried if they are going to get accepted by the top tier colleges and universities or not. However, it can be very unhealthy to their wallet and their mental health as they fail to achieve their future. One example is not being able to get their dream job after going to a super expensive private school, it can be very draining for them. Therefore, I tried to make an analysis about the topic of going to college.

            I liked writing the essay, it was a very interesting topic to me. I have friends who did not go to college and still had a good life. It’s just that their social life gets very limited, though, I also have a limited social life in college. I also have a friend who wanted to go to college really badly, but they were limited in their country. The research process was fine and it took me a while to generate my thoughts in the writing. I had some difficulties in putting similar datas to my essay because it might make my essay very repetitive. My synthesis was fine, not the best but I tried.