High school papers. The most soulless, draining, and boring things I ever had to deal with. Well, I’m obviously exaggerating but as I’ve mentioned in all of my reflections, but when reading for ELA classes, I only looked very straight forward when reading as I’ve mentioned in my phase one reflection, “Throughout my middle and Highschool years, for most really meaningful texts I’ve read, I read only to get from point A to point B. In the sense that I never truly thought of the author’s intentions as I read through their work, only making a timeline to answer a few questions given to me by my teacher.” which in turn made my writing bland, straightforward, and even robotic to me. Over the course of this class, I have definitely improved on this however, making my works more refreshing and honestly a lot easier to format and create. Before I discuss how I largely benefited from this class, I do want to mention prior that my work can still be improved by so much, and I didn’t necessarily take advantage of most of what was offered in this course. HOWEVER, I have followed and taken to heart most of the goals of the course, and I believe that it’s shown pretty well through my works.
My first thoughts when coming into class were, to be quite frank, very standard. I thought that this was going to be a class centered around the same reading and analysis as every other class. It was made apparent very quickly that this was not the case however, as our Professor made 2 things very apparently. The first is the thematics of what our work is gonna be and what she wanted us to take from it. The second is that we absolutely won’t be looking at work the same way as before. Therefore introducing us to phase 1 of our class. Phase 1, a sort of practice for the rhetoric we were being introduced to, went over one goal of the course, in which we “Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.” and sort of touched on “Recognizing and practicing key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.” All while promoting us to look into the nuances of language. For my phase 1 assignment, I started off strongly focusing more on the linguistic and cultural aspect of what we were discussing as I intended to “to challenge the idea of a standard language unifying communities of all levels, and to have others similar to me think more about the implications of how they communicate with others.” Which in turn, also led to my first use of rhetoric. To preface this, I was very robotic with my writing as I’ve mentioned before, so I wasn’t exactly sure how to properly go through it on my own even with the basics learned. Amy tan’s “Mother’s tongue” was an absolute eye opener for me, and in this phase and even the other 2, you’ll notice that it heavily affected my use of rhetoric, and I unconsciously and consciously attempted to style my works in a similar manner, as I even allude in my phase 1 analysis, “using my thoughts and experiences in the first place, it allows me to push my reader through a similar thought process, albeit I wasn’t as thorough as I wanted to be. In doing this, I can instead leave the reader lingering with their own thoughts, not necessarily taking my conclusion as fact, and even questioning what I said.” taking away from my own impressions of what Amy Tan wanted the reader to get out of her own work.
Phase 2 directly worked on improving and applying everything that I discussed in terms of phase 1. Instead of just analyzing rhetorical situations, we now very strongly were working on ““Recognizing and practicing key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.” I feel that I did this well, and with Amy tan’s influence yet again, I strived to “use my own internal conflict. I wanted to get the reader into thinking about the nuances of culture and language, while also helping them follow through my own thought process.” Unlike phase 1 however, I not only began to use direct cultural examples in order to tie it into future paragraphs, but intended to focus on a specific phrase, namely “I am American”, and use it to formulate a single consensus throughout the entire text. With phase 2 I essentially began to think more about the “consequences” of my writing and how it can lead directly into others. As such I began to utilize rhetoric more in the actual structure of my essay, as I do here with the last sentence before my conclusion in my assignment, “Thus, “I am American” becomes a blanket term. Just like how I didn’t know the lingo or street smarts of a Dominican in the D.R, they probably wouldn’t know the same for a Dominican in New York.” As I get people accustomed to the concepts I brought up previously, I don’t just show what they lead to immediately, but bring it together at the very end, allowing the readers to actually interpret and understand my writing as a whole.
Phase 3, the last and honestly the most lasting experience that this class is going to give me; Considering that it’s a research paper too, I expected it to be a different experience entirely. However, it completely encompassed everything that the course provides as well as topping off the last 3 goals that I feel I’ve completed during the course. In terms of “Examining how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users.”, I go above and beyond in this in a sense, as I discuss how community, language, and discrimination affect people online, so I gained extensive knowledge on real world examples of linguistic disparity. In terms of both “Composing texts that integrate a stance with appropriate sources, using strategies such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argumentation.” This assignment was definitely made to help us reach that goal, and what I found extremely surprising is that my knowledge on rhetoric helped me organize my essay a lot better. Instead of trying to stuff information into just one paragraph over and over, I smoothly went from point to point until tying it all off in the end. As such I was also able to “Practice systematic application of citation conventions.” as my citations were much more fluid and inline with my work.
In general, my work feels very reminiscent of each other, seemingly building off of the other throughout the course. For this reason, my work on phase three is the smoothest, in terms of argument and readability, paper I have ever written, and clearly shows my progression through this class. As such, I feel that this course has either helped or completely cleansed my “highschoolpaperitis”, and for that I want to thank Professor Zlotnick once again!
