I remember entering class for the first day of the semester. It was a bit confusing going in because I was questioning what this class was going to be all about. The main thoughts and ideas going into this class for the first time were Science based topics and writing about them. Well in a way, I was correct but not in the way I expected it to be. Throughout this semester, I was able to learn so many new skills in not just writing, but also applying information that is presented to me in an article and transforming that into my own ideas through writing. This was something that I thought was very hard to do because I thought it was hard to transform information that is presented literally to be one sided meaning that you cannot bring your own ideas into it since they are already proven true but through learning in the course, I was able to do this by learning how to literature review. Writing is something that is conveyed through different ideas and visuals presented in words, not just words that are describing something.
In the first assignment, we did a Resume and Cover letter. Naturally I was really good at Resume and Cover Letters because I took a business course in my High School for 4 years which gave me heavy experience in creating Resume and Cover Letters. I was able to write an amazing cover letter in which during the peer review, I was even asked “Have I written a cover letter before” because it was really good. Doing peer review, I was able to critique my peers’ resume and cover letter pretty well with my high knowledge of knowing how to do it. This assignment allowed me to enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment.
The 2nd assignment was based upon rhetorical analysis. I chose an ad from Pantene the shampoo company in which they had a commercial aired in the Philippines where it speaks out against society putting a negative label on women doing their works and dreams. The rhetorical analysis I found to be very natural at doing because I am someone who likes visuals and then applying it to my own thoughts so when describing the commercial, I was able to develop deep thoughts on how the article connects towards society as a whole and how it connects the dots towards rhetorical appeals in this case of the article I chose, it appealed with pathos. This assignment developed my skills in using rhetorical appeals to further develop my thoughts in an ad that produces information on what it is trying to speak out. The literature review showed how I was able to formulate and articulate a stance through and in my writing as well as strengthen my source use practices due to using the source of the ad and developing my thoughts through it.
The 3rd assignment was the literature review. This assignment was one where the class had to work in groups so my group had to decide and agree on what topic we wanted to focus on for the literature review. After brainstorming, we agreed upon talking about the Impact of the Lack of Prevention, Awareness, and Recovery for Hearing Loss in Adolescents. For the assignment to be split up, we decided to pick topics that each of us are comfortable focusing on for the main problem we are discussing. During the peer review, one thing that stood out towards my group was that in our literature review, we were not consistent at all with the tone of our writing and how we moved on with finishing our paragraph and transferring it to make it seem like the writing was written by one person. Because of this, I was able to learn how to write an essay with multiple people but also keeping it consistent with the tone because everyone write’s differently but when you are doing group writing, you must make it seem very similar so that the way the reader it reading it will not get thrown off with how differently each section is. I was also able to learn how to transfer information from another source and put it into my own ideas in which, further expresses them in the argument that me and my group were making in the literature review. The literature reviewed allowed me to acknowledge my and others’ range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility and develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
The 4th assignment was me and my group’s children’s book. This was my favorite assignment of all and probably one of my favorite assignments that I have ever done. Through this assignment, we had to use our literature review and transform it into a story. Now at the start, this was something that I thought would be crazy difficult because I did not know how it would be possible to transfer something that is composed of lots of detailed information that is trying to solve a solution, and put it not just visually, but also understanding for kids. During the process, me and my group had to create characters that were going to be presented in the book, the story line, and the settings. Because the children’s book was targeted towards kids, which have a smaller understanding of things, we had to apply rhetorical appeals to further extract how the literature review was going to appeal to kids. This is something that I took in when doing this because I would have never thought that Rhetorical appeals can be used to target kids, only arguments. Further developing our book, it was awesome and amazing to see how it was being applied to our book, therefore it taught us to negotiate our own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation as well as engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.
The final assignment was our presentation for the children’s book in which we had to create a presentation based on how we created the children’s book. The presentation showed problems that we came across and also how we incorporated the information from our rhetorical analysis to the children’s book. What this presentation taught me was my speaking skills in public speaking. Although we did it online, it was great to verbally talk and explain the process in how we developed our children’s book. Because of the business class that I took in High School, I was able to quickly think during my talk in the presentation and I was able to further explain the slides. From all the assignments that I have done in this course, I have learned how to effectively write and convey the message I wanted to speak out in different ways such as the literature review and the children’s book but this class also allowed me to learn how to effectively peer review for my fellow classmates in improving their work as well.
