Reflecting On The Semester...

In comp. 2 this semester we have focused a lot on the components of rhetoric, which are ethos, pathos, and logos, more than in any other English class I've been in. Perhaps the most important of these in our assignments was ethos. In writing, ethos "names the persuasive appeals of one's character" , In other words, when using ethos, the author should put his/herself into the argument in a way that the reader sees him/her as trustworthy. This has been somewhat difficult for me to do this semester because I wasn't entirely sure how to, even after our first discussions about it in class. Like I said, I had learned about ethos, pathos, and logos previously, but had never particularly focused on ethos before, so it was fairly new to me. In past classes I remember focusing mostly on pathos. That resulted in a big fat surprise D for me on our first big paper of the semester about technology. It was an argumentative paper about cyberbullying, a negative effect of technology. I had incorporated all three rhetoric components poorly and had lost nearly half of the points for each. That was a little bit of a wakeup call.

Luckily I did a lot better on our second paper, the Rogerian assignment. We were instructed to write a Rogerian argument, and once again I was worried because I had never heard of it before and was sure I would do something wrong again. The first thing I focused on when I began to write my paper was ethos, and how I was going to put myself into my paper with a trustworthy tone. I succeeded in doing it correctly by showing the reader that I used to have a similar mindset before I had done more research about the topic. My topic was recycling, and how it may not be as beneficial as we think. In my intro I said, "our society as a whole, including I, basically accepted this recycling move as heroic, and even though recycling is admirable and no doubt healthy for the earth, we did not really look into its effects much and just took it for what it was said to be." I made sure to give the audience credit for their good intentions. This, along with a few other things, scored me an A on the assignment. I was very relieved after getting that grade.

I'm not sure how I feel about my performance in the class overall. That one bad grade really got to me. It made it hard for me to get a decent grade in the class and I'm still not sure what I am going to end up with. I can honestly say I learned a lot though. I enjoyed several of the things we did in class, like the videos we watched and topics we discussed. They definitely changed my perspectives on a couple things, but also strengthened others. We explored new ways of composition like using blogs and websites for assignments and that was interesting and also challenging to me at the same time. I have never been tech-savvy at all, and was a little proud that I accomplished a semester in a class that revolved around technology.