Self Assessment: How I achieved the class goals

When I was told about this class, I thought the theme will surround medicine and how we sympathize with patients. But there was more to this class. This class was meant to teach us how to identify rhetorical situations. In an attempt to master rhetorical situations, we had several course outcomes for which we were to aim for. I believe that I was able to achieve most of these outcomes. Some of these outcomes are Acknowledging the difference between my and other’s linguistic range as a source and using it to draw on rhetorical sensibility, explore and analyze in reading and writing, varieties of genres and rhetorical situations, understanding, and using print and digital technologies to address a range of audience, practice and recognize rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations, Locate research sources, and practice systematic application of citation conventions. I believe that I was able to achieve these goals because in all my major writing I made sure to use rhetorical situations as well as point out who the audiences are.

It took a terrible score on my essay and a couple of tries to get to this goal. At first, in my SBE in which I wrote about men’s rights activists, I focused too much on the subject matter instead of executing the use of rhetorical situations. I talked about the issue the author was trying to get across instead of who they were targeting and what their purpose was. But after advice from my teacher, I was able to address these audiences.  For example, in this essay, I used an article called “The Men’s Rights Movement Is a Response to Feminism’s Excesses” by Bruce Walker, I was able to determine that he was targeting politicians due to his choice of words like rights, America, a century ago, and clarion call. These words are used by politicians when they are running for office. I was able to use the words such as maltreated and mocked to conclude that the author had an angry tone.  With the help of the teacher, I was able to use the range of linguistics of various articles to draw out rhetorical sensibility.

The first few discussion posts surrounded us by analyzing the rhetorical situations of different articles. One example was “The Danger of Tipping While Black” by Hair Ziyad. From this post, I can conclude that in the beginning, I didn’t properly analyze the rhetorical situation in reading and writing of various genres. I say this because in this post I was able to clearly state that the purpose of the article was to educate the audience about how blacks are shamed for not tipping at times. But I failed to state the audience and the tone the author used. Since this was in the first few weeks of school, I didn’t have a good idea of how to Identify rhetorical situations. After several with the teaching, I was able to change this. This is evident in one of the last few discussion posts. This one came after the SBE essay. It was a discussion on “Bad’ English is Part of my Korean American Heritage?” by Park Hong, I was able to clearly state that the author had a questioning tone, light-hearted tone, and an empathetic tone. I concluded that the audiences were non-whites and immigrant families since it surrounded English that did not accommodate the way whites speak it. And lastly, I was able to identify that the purpose was to bring people who would not sit together in one room, to sit and carefully listen to each other.

I was able to understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences as well as practice and recognize rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations during the composition for two genres assignment. During this assignment, I was able to gain an understanding of how to use Twitter. I have never used Twitter before, so I was able to gain knowledge on not only how to post my thoughts but how to make them short and impactful. When I was creating my PowerPoint, I was able to sit down and break down what group I was targeting and who I would present them to. I also had to narrow down my purpose. I was able to decide that my target audiences were college students, and my purpose was to show the true issues of men’s rights while making them aware of how feminists have caused these issues. I learned how to practice the use of rhetorical terms and strategies. I decided to use pictures of Twitter posts as well as pictures of a young man their age who was placed in a cruel predicament because of these issues.

It was a struggle to identify scholarly articles. Citing them was not challenging. Make sure to use proper MLA citation. But the searching for scholarly articles in a database is the one thing I haven’t been able to achieve this semester. Locating scholarly articles and identifying them is something I’m going to need to work on. For my writing assignments, I always must go back and forth with the teacher to confirm that my articles are scholarly. Apart from this, I was able to meet the criteria of all other learning outcomes. I can now walk out of the class with confidence that I have a great understanding of how to use rhetorical situations and how to identify them.