December 18, 2020   Friday

Before I entered college…

Four months of courses are coming to an end, how should I describe this semester of college life? I actually struggled with the fact that this year was a special year and I had less of the real feeling of entering college. In fact, before I entered the university, I would be looking forward to and afraid of the university life, I was looking forward to the fact that I could finally go to the university, I could learn a broader knowledge and learn to enter the social life, at the same time I was afraid that I could not do well, I was afraid that I could not keep up with the progress of the course, I was afraid that I could not adapt to the rhythm of the university. So, at the beginning I would enter this class feeling scared and uneasy. My writing skills have always been poor, and grammar and vocabulary are my biggest concerns in writing, so I was afraid that my classmates would make fun of my writing skills. But after so much time together, I found that my classmates were very friendly, and they would give me suggestions for each week’s comment, and the professor would also tell me my writing weaknesses and shortcomings and help me correct them. So this writing course also has a lot of meaning to me, not only to help me improve my writing, but also to improve my English.

In high school, my teachers would always say that there would be countless assignments and papers after I entered college, and that I would have to do homework until midnight every day, so I began to dread college life at that time. In high school, I only wrote two or three pages of essays to deal with the test, using the format taught by the teacher to complete my essays. In other words, I don’t really know how to write an expert paper.

After I entered university…

But when I entered college, I found that the way of learning was completely different from my high school days. There was less of a step-by-step essay format, so I would find it a little difficult going into this course because I hadn’t attempted to write so many professionally difficult essays. But I knew that was the starting point for me to start creating professional essays. I am impressed to remember how difficult it was for me to find a scholarly source at the beginning and the worry of scurrying to write a thousand-word essay. But thankfully, I was able to choose my own topic on any social issue, and I think it is the greatest for an essay to express the topic, the main idea and the thoughts that interest you in an essay. If I don’t like the topic, how can I write an essay that will convince others?

After I started to get used to the course’s progress, I started to work on the first draft , and I chose a social issue that is highly discussed in society: domestic violence as the topic of my first essay. In the first draft of my first essay, I simply used the basic approach of introduction, paragraph, and conclusion to scramble it. At first, I did not understand the real use and meaning of rhetorical analysis, so you can imagine how bad my first draft was. But fortunately, I learned from my professor’s revisions and my classmates’ suggestions that rhetorical strategies play an important role in a piece of writing, so, I realized from the revision process that rhetorical strategies help me to show different effects, and convey better intonation, context, and emotion. The rhetorical analysis was able to take my strategies and analyze them in depth rather than summarize the ideas. In the first essay, I learned to use some emotional tone to express the cruelty of domestic violence, which also helped the connection between the characters and the theme in the essay. Furthermore, the most difficult point was to find the right research materials to prove my main idea. Although many of the sources were about domestic violence, many of the research papers did not match my topic or did not express my point of view well. So this made me realize that finding appropriate and reliable sources is also an important step in convincing others of my essay. Rhetorical essays are better at presenting the purpose, audience, and genre of the essay clearly. I may not have analyzed it better in my first essay, but, after many revisions and feedback from my teacher, I think I have a higher level of understanding and better analysis than before.

After completing my first study on writing essays, I began to research the Inquiry-Based Research Essay, and this time I chose school bullying as the topic of my essay. This time, I had a better understanding of rhetorical strategies, so I could analyze the audience, purpose, genre and rhetorical use of the essay more clearly than the first time, but finding relevant research materials was still my weakness, and finding enough evidence to prove my main idea was still a challenge. However, another problem that I started to struggle with was how to choose some better quotes to explain my ideas among the sources I found. I think that many passages in the sources I found could be used as quotes, and it was difficult to choose the best quote to analyze my ideas in a comprehensive way. This is a problem that I have been trying to break through and improve, and I hope that in my future papers I can be more accurate in finding the most useful quotes to analyze.

The last paper was the one I had the biggest problem with, even though I had furthered my understanding of rhetorical strategies and genres, I had major problems with the form of the two genres in my first draft, due to the fact that I used different forms of advertisements and posters to present my topic. At first, I didn’t know how to create the video ad myself, so I searched for some online videos to elaborate on it. Through my teacher’s reminder, I realized the serious problem: even though I analyzed the video of the ad, it was not a video I made by hand, so it didn’t belong to my genre. Therefore, I made the video ad myself in revision, and although the elements on the ad were taken from the internet, this time it was an ad that belonged to me to make and expressed the rhetorical concept of my emotions and analysis of school bullying. I realized that the best way to express my feelings was to use a genre that I had created. In addition, the use of the commercial video and poster was to achieve a visual effect with the purpose of bringing attention to school bullying to various audience targets. In the video, I used a rhetorical strategy to tell how horrible school bullying is for the victims, in order to call on more students to stop bullying. And the poster is to pass on to more parents and educators to make them more aware that parents are concerned about their children’s growth and education and to pass on more positive energy to their students. This essay taught me to personally create different genre forms to convey different rhetorical analysis. I learned to understand the use of different rhetorical strategies from different genres.

My perceptions

Before I entered college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the future, I thought I could find a good job in the future by finding a good major. But now it makes me realize that I need to find a major that I like in order to enter college. And after this class, I realized that literature is also an interesting major. Although I will not be majoring in literature, it is a very helpful thing for me to learn writing skills. I believe that writing theory is an essential skill no matter what kind of major I take in the future. Although I wrote a lot of complicated papers in this course, it was only after taking this class that I realized more that there are still a lot of social problems in this society waiting for us to figure out how to solve them.  As a result, it not only gave me writing skills, but also made me aware of the cruel social problems that exist in all corners of the world.

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