There are many things they don’t tell you before you enter college. One of which is that you’d think, at 18 years old, legally considered an adult in the eyes of the law, that you know everything there is to know about writing for a class. I mean, you’ve been taught how to organize a paragraph since you were 11, and you have been telling stories through writing since before then. Despite my plethora of English classes and all of their lessons tucked into my sleeve, there was still room for improvement that this first unit of Freshman Composition taught me. I didn’t know how to really seamlessly incorporate anecdotes and rhetorical devices in the same written space; I feel like I always struggled with the two being interconnected in a way that made sense. The unit’s This I No Longer Believe narrative was extremely useful for me to really visualize the two and their bond in emotional writing. Of course I knew the usefulness of rhetorical devices in nonfiction writing, but this unit truly underlined the few different applications of specific rhetorical tools that I can easily use in my writing, like anaphora and antithesis. In the conclusion of my narrative, I was very impressed with myself in my incorporation of antithesis in a way that solidified my opinions on New York City developing and changing over time. Being able to effectively connect the audience with my individual life with rhetoric was very exciting for me. However, the most exciting activity in this unit was the dialect test for me. Not only was it engaging and fun, but it was really interesting to compare results with my peers and see what was different amongst them.
If I could go back through this unit, I would have spent less time outlining my major assignment and more time interconnecting ideas. My first draft is so different from my final draft that it put me in a stressful situation closer to the deadline, since I felt like I was writing an entirely different assignment by the end. Much of this was because I took the edits I got from peer review very seriously, considering they interpreted this assignment through the eyes of a student like me, with the same deadlines and structured instructions. While it was naturally very helpful, I think in the next unit I really want to take advantage of office hours and get more teacher feedback. I found the most useful tool in this unit to truly be the feedback on the second draft from the professor, where it was extremely targeted to the rubric and what you were really looking for as a grader. Truly, I am very proud of how concise but effective my writing is; there was not really a moment where I felt like I was blabbering or going off on a tangent when writing, something that took a while to teach myself.
Genuinely, I participated a lot in this unit, something out of my comfort zone. This is a new place, and regardless of being here in this class since August, I still have a lot to learn about my peers, professor, and myself honestly. I would love to explore myself as a writer more, considering this unit’s main assessment was very personal, and it forced me to write about my personal beliefs in a way I hadn’t before. I wonder what this essay would have looked like if I’d been exposed to this sort of emotional vulnerability prior, or even outside of this graded and stress inducing context. After this unit, I really can’t wait to see the way I go about analyzing rhetorical devices in a more persuasive context rather than a personal one.
