reflective statement
This ENC 2135 class has been a very interesting and engaging class this semester. I learned many new writing techniques, genres, and forms of rhetoric while completing the three required projects for the course. For example, throughout my entire time in highschool, I had only written five or six research papers similar to the structure of our first paper, and none nowhere near the time frame of the projects in this course. At first, I thought that I would not be able to accomplish the three thousand word daunting task, however, when we were discussing the guidelines in class for completing the first project with Dr. Wenzel, who was able to convey the process for writing this paper in simple terms, my faith in my ability to write the paper increased. So on a personal level, I believe that this class allowed me to see my full writing potential. Additionally, when composing all the papers for this class, I learned new techniques to execute a more professional style of writing which also made it clearer for the reader to understand the meaning behind my work. In particular, I discovered that I should use an active voice in my essays and that I should elaborate an abundant amount on any quotes I used. Although it might seem repetitive, I learned that the main objective behind our work, not only for this specific class, but in the future as well, is to make it clear to the reader to be informed or persuaded regarding our issue that we were discussing.
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During the development of the second paper for this class, I realized that types of rhetoric could exist in a variety of compositions. For example, I was instructed to analyze the exigence, or the reasoning behind creating something, the medium, or structure of two artifacts pertaining to my topic. I feel as if though in highschool, we were only told to analyze the ethos, pathos, and logos of work, so this class gave me the opportunity to exercise this new analysis ability. I had also never analyzed the rhetoric of a video, or really any medium other than literature, before, so I was able to learn the techniques of that as well.
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When writing my third paper for the class, which required us to create a personal campaign against a societal issue of our choice, I acquired much new knowledge about genres than I had previously studied. Throughout my K-12 education, most of my instructors focused on very basic genres of writing, such as mystery, nonfiction, and fantasy, to name a few. However, after taking Dr. Wenzel’s class, I found out that our work that we could create could be classified into many different genre compositions, for example, videos, blog posts, and even songs. Personally speaking, I felt so conditioned from highschool that classic genres were the only ones that existed, and I honestly did not even care to think that style of writing could be considered its genre, so this class opened my eyes to that.