Reflecting on Rhetoric: An Academic Journey

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To paraphrase the opening of my midterm portfolio, I came into this class believing that it would just be a review of my AP English classes. By week five, I realized that my expectations were wrong. Within just those five weeks, I learned what a rhetorical situation is, what role it plays in a text, how to identify and analyze its components to understand the argument of a text. I slowly began to uncover how the components of rhetorical situation such as genre, genre convention, and audience all interact to reinforce the argument. With a completed RA and RIP under my belt, I am in a great position to reflect on all the skills that I have learned, improved upon, and struggle with during this quarter. One major skill that I have learned and improved on this quarter is analysis of the rhetorical situation. From the small exercises to the RA, I have gained a better understanding of rhetoric in text. But, a substantial …show more content…

This new way of draft, despite being time-consuming, has allow me to work through ideas first, then think about what words to use. This goes hand-in-hand with word economy, since understanding ideas first helps decide how best to present the idea. By targeting ideas, my overall analysis of rhetoric has become stronger. However, a major issue with this process is not giving enough time to revise a draft. In retrospective, I think this is the area I improve if I had more time, especially comes after the way I drafted my RIP. The main reason I would need to improve on this is because I only revised my draft a couple of times, which means there are most likely lots of errors that could be corrected. Taking my experiences with the RIP drafts, I will do my best to create a balance between creating new drafts from frameworks of the old and putting in the time and effort to revise my

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