Reflection on Project 2

This blog post is a question and answer reflection to the Project 2 rhetorical essay.

Theilmann, Mira "Screenshot from my computer"
Taken 2015 October 24

1.
My first draft was too focused on the situation being addressed by the article and not enough on the rhetorical strategies.  This lead to a lot of moving around sentence order and rewriting transition sentences.  The analysis of the rhetorical strategies was effective and present, but the overall goal of the first drafts was not clear.

2.
My problems with thesis were derived from the same problem as addressed in the first question.  The thesis was ok, but it was not clear on what the main goal of the essay was.  I spent too much of the introduction explaining the background.  This did not transition well into the thesis.  In terms of organization, I split up one paragraph and I also moved around a lot of the body paragraph analysis.  Hopefully the new body paragraphs are more accurate to my thesis.

3.
When I took the viewpoints and shared views of the new freshman audience into consideration, my essay started to become a lot more relevant.  Originally I did not directly want to talk to the audience, but this kind of analysis works a lot better with the prompt.

4.
I think my credibility remained constant, as my analysis is the most important part of the essay.  I think I addressed the article successfully.  Changing my essay to appeal directly to the audience increases my chances of the audience understanding and agreeing with my points.  So I suppose, because it is more clear I did gain some credibility.

5.
The audience likely shares my views on the environment, so I could spend less time explaining why the event was important and more on how the author was rhetorically successful in explaining the event's importance.


6.
I had a lot of very long sentences and bulky quotes with analysis in weird spots.  When I split up a lot of sentences and placed the analysis either right before or after the quote, my main points were a lot more clear.  I also eliminated as much biased language as possible to maintain credibility.

7.
As I stated in the last question, clarity allows for more understanding.  It was much more benefitial to change the structure to a more audience friendly format and less reminiscent of my own thought process.

8.
No, I was pretty familiar with the conventions of the rhetorical essay genre.  I  definitely have a lot more experience writing in this style, but addressing the right audience was definitely the hardest part.

9.
Writing a paper and moving on without reflection, does not allow for learning from your mistakes.  Reflection requires that you face these mistakes and address them.  Therefore you are much less likely to make the same mistakes again.

REFLECTION:

Chloe's blog related quite a bit to my experience with relaying my points to the audience.  I found that in revising I really had to go back and restructure a lot of my body paragraphs to make sure the point of the essay was explicit.  Samantha's was similar in regards to thesis statements.  Although I really liked my original thesis, the introduction did not transition well and it was a little bulky.  Breaking it up and incorporating more of the main prompt of the assignment into my introduction made the thesis a lot more clear.