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What the Study of Rhetoric has Taught me So Far

Word Count: 1235

 

I’ve never considered myself a good writer, but I have always enjoyed writing. For the most part, whenever I wrote alone or for fun I had no trouble letting my thoughts flow onto the paper. But now as I’ve grown up, and especially since I’ve begun college, I have realized that any writing is a powerful thing that can affect people. This realization has motivated me for the first time to truly work on improving my writing and learning new skills, which ERH-101 has helped me to do. When I began the course, when I wrote academically I still wrote in the standard cut and dry high-school method. I used the same five paragraph structure that had satisfied my high school teachers and filled my entire essay with fluff that I thought would check off each box on the grading rubric. Now, coming to the conclusion of the class, I feel I have improved my writing significantly, but haven’t changed my writing style much at all. The few tips we have been given, and the insight into professional writing by a professional writer has educated me on a very meta level. Writing about writing, as I am now, has given me a whole new perspective.

 

My writing has noticeably improved in two areas. First, my thesis statements are more direct and aggressive then they were before, which makes my writing more guided and focused. It helps prevent me from straying off course and going on tangents, which I am fond of. I notice it more now as a reader as well, I can tell when a thesis makes a defendable or provable claim and thus can see the effect it has in structuring the rest of the writing so that it is easy to follow and process. Second, I tone myself down a lot less. The big lesson I have taken away from the last paper and its associated readings is that no matter what we do our personality seeps into everything, especially something as creative as writing. When I tried to write academically or ‘neutrally’, as I thought it was, it just came out bland because of how detached and uninterested I was. So now, after four mouths of class, my thesis statements have become more direct and my writing has become more personal.

The change in my thesis statements happened quite abruptly, after the first paper I wrote for the class was commented on and reviewed. Looking back on it now, I can clearly see the mistake I made in the thesis and how it led to my poor work later in the essay. My thesis statement isn’t even a claim, it is an obvious statement declaring my intentions. “By examining Stanford’s engineering website, using Swales writings on discourse communities as a guideline, I will examine how it fits into the engineering discourse community as a tool for new members, and how it accomplishes its goals of preparing people to be engineers” (Engineering Discourse Community). I make no claims, no statements, and my thesis contains nothing arguable. The only thing that could follow that claim up in the conclusion is “I have just examined how the website fits into the discourse community.” I can see that instead my thesis should have been more related to the point I make later in the essay; the website works as an intermediary for new members of the community to get jobs. This argument is presented in the essay, but without the proper introduction it is easy for a reader to miss the core of the argument. The new outlook I have on writing my thesis is probably the most visible change in my writing that occurred this semester, and its impact is immediate and clear. My papers have a sense of direction that they didn’t establish before.

The biggest internal change I have made, however, may not be visible immediately between two of my papers. It is more of a passive change, a change on my outlook about writing. This is the change that has made the biggest difference for me, as it has helped me regain motivation to do projects and stop procrastinating with all my writing. In high school, most of my academic writing shared some common traits that were not unique to my writing alone- it was bland, dull, and uninteresting. The text was dry, the format had been used a million times, and the paper was nothing more than a Frankenstein of its sources, the writing contributed no new knowledge and took nothing from old knowledge. I am sure now, in retrospect, that it was no more fun to grade than it was to write. The reason for this is one I was very excited to identify and defeat; all writing has undeniable biases. Biases that cannot be completely censored or eliminated. All writing is created by a person, and what words they wish to put on the page is influenced by an infinite number of things. I was convinced of this when I first read Donald Murray’s writing “All Writing is Autobiography”. In it, he makes the titular claim that all writing is both created and interpreted by a unique human being, and over the course of time even the same person will find different meaning in writing based on their life (Murray). This was the turning point for me. The reason that my writing in the past had been so dull was because I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to be neutral. I had thought that since the writing I was doing was academic, I had to eliminate all bias and write without influence. In retrospect, this was crazy, as all it really accomplished was to eliminate any excitement I had about the paper by forcing myself to suppress any feeling I had about the topic or prompt. This had been the root cause of my boring paper problem all along. It is still evident in the tone of my first paper, where despite some moments of emotion the lexis that I use and the attitude that I have are reserved and stuffy. After the Murray reading, some in-class discussion, and some personal thinking, by my third paper I do not hold back at all. I write as I would speak and provide my thoughts and input on the discussion. I let my writing be what it is, a personal creation of my thoughts and opinions. It has been a wonderful transition that I believe has been for the better, as I now enjoy writing most essays, including this one.

My expectations about English coming into college were that it would be a difficult writing-intensive class with plenty of reading. Even though these expectations have been technically accurate, the class is nothing like I would have imagined it. It took a completely different approach to teaching about the use and interpretation of the language, and I am glad it has. I have learned a lot, and I feel my writing has reached a new level of maturity and development. I have studied and learned about how to structure an essay and the reasoning behind it. I have let myself become involved and interested in essays, and so far, it has led to making my essays more interesting for me to write and, from what my peers have said, better to read.

 

Works Cited:

Murray, Donald M. “All Writing Is Autobiography.” College Composition and Communication 42.1 (1991): 66-77. Print.

Faust, Hayden. “Rhetoric Essay: Stanford Universitites Website” Hayden Faust’s VMI Website, https://sites.vmi.edu/fausthe20/2016/10/02/rhetoric-essay-stanford-universities-website/. Accessed 10 December, 2016.

Essay 4 Draft

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I’ve never considered myself a good writer, but I have always enjoyed writing. For the most part, whenever I wrote alone or for fun I had no trouble letting my thoughts flow onto the paper. But now as I’ve grown up, and especially since I’ve begun college, I have realized that any writing is a powerful thing that can affect people. This realization has motivated me for the first time to truly work on improving my writing and learning new skills, which ERH-101 has helped me to do. When I began the course, when I wrote academically I still wrote in the standard cut and dry high-school method. I used the same five paragraph structure that had satisfied my high school teachers and filled my entire essay with fluff that I thought would check off each box on the grading rubric. Now, coming to the conclusion of the class, I feel I have improved my writing significantly, but haven’t changed my writing style much at all. The few tips we have been given, and the insight into professional writing by a professional writer has educated me on a very meta level. Writing about writing, as I am now, has given me a whole new perspective.

 

My writing has noticeably improved in two areas. First, my thesis statements are more direct and aggressive then they were before, which makes my writing more guided and focused. It helps prevent me from straying off course and going on tangents, which I am fond of. I notice it more now as a reader as well, I can tell when a thesis makes a defendable or provable claim and thus can see the effect it has in structuring the rest of the writing so that it is easy to follow and process. Second, I tone myself down a lot less. The big lesson I have taken away from the last paper and its associated readings is that no matter what we do our personality seeps into everything, especially something as creative as writing. When I tried to write academically or ‘neutrally’, as I thought it was, it just came out bland because of how detached and uninterested I was. So now, after four mouths of class, my thesis statements have become more direct and my writing has become more personal.

Brainstorming 12/2

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My writing style is pretty much what I’m going to try and do right now; I write down everything I think of in an almost linear fashion. Usually whenever I get a writing assignment, as soon as I begin to think about it phrases and ideas begin to form in my head. I do my best to get these down right away, and I often try to flow with the ideas as much as possible. I go almost into an autopilot, thinking at a breakneck page, watching my words appear on the page straight out of my mind.  I also encounter the blessing and the curse of being able to think faster than I can type. Sometimes this means that I get to far behind on my tying and lose my train of thought, sometimes for good. On the other hand, breaks like this allow me to quickly go back and analyze what I have just wrote to ensure it makes sense and stays on topic. Some would consider my writing style free-form or unstructured, and I can understand why, but for me is is entirely structured. The entire plan for what I want to write is in my mind, I just transcribe it onto the page. On bigger projects or papers, of course, I will write ideas down and write them out so that I do not forget, as these I normally do over a longer span of time and frequently think of ideas and sentences that fit in the essay far beyond the section I am currently working on.

Osborne Functional Outline

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I find that Osborne’s writing style is very similar to mine, and the structure and language that he uses seem pretty natural for me.

In the introduction paragraph, the goal of the writing is not quite obvious at first. Since Osborne has decided to tell a story, he first tries to get the reader hooked with an ambiguous seen that his audience may be able to identify with that catches interest. At the end of the paragraph, however, he makes a bold claim about writing that he will later explain and back up.

The next two paragraphs, which are pretty long, tell the rest of the story that he alluded to in the intro. It is slightly long-winded, but it seems that he is both appealing to the emotions of the reader and ensuring that all the information that is need to  understand the background of the situation where he made his bold claim.

It is in the fourth paragraph that he finally bluntly states his realization. Afterwards, however, he is able to back his statement up and strengthen his argument by referencing information he gave us during the previous two paragraphs. Without this information we would not fully understand what brought him to this decision, so his decision to tell the whole backstory is given a purpose understood by the audience. He then goes on to cite other examples from his past to add to his supporting argument.

 

Invention Exercise

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Fluent Writing

  • Writing in which multiple sentences are written without pause
  • Revision is done to the whole writing that is created after multiple sentences are written
  • Multiple ideas that all come out together.

Miscues

  • Mistakes only fully seen when the writing process is analyzed
  • Can be made either encoding or decoding
  • Thought errors/disconnects on the part of the writer
  • Plays into misinterpreted ideas or sentences

Editing

  • High level vs. low level
  • High level: Thoughts, ideas, structure and function of paragraphs and paper
  • Low level: Spelling, grammar , vocabulary

Learning by Trial (Winsor)

  • Talks about the use of knowledge in the real world vs. class room/learning environments
  • Shows in research how many students think that using knowledge “in the field”  is more beneficial

 

11/30 Meta Moment

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The best way I have found of ensuring that knowledge I gather from models is applicable to real life situations is to either ensure the model is taught to me by someone who has applied it in their work, or either ask somebody with similar insight after I have learned it.

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Developed Literacies

Hayden Faust

ERH-101

11/28/16

Word Count: 1137

In a way, it is mainly my literacies that led me to choose VMI. It seems, in my life and in the lives of others, that one’s ideals, morals, and values are directly connected to their literacies in some way. I know that for me, in some cases my literacies affected my outlook on life and my values, and in some cases, it was the opposite scenario. I sought out things that I thought I would be interested in, and became literate in them. When I think if my literacies long term, two major factors come to mind immediately as things that had a major impact on my life: my family and its’ history, as well as the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. When I was a child and later a teenager growing up, it was primarily my family who influenced me and effected what I read, and Atlas Shrugged is the first time that I made a choice to read something in my interest and it heavily affected my entire worldview. That is why I believe that in my early life, my family was my biggest literacy sponsor, in my adulthood it has been Ayn Rand, and these sponsors have made me a big producer and consumer of knowledge regarding my culture and heritage as well as society and social issues.

 

 

Generalizing my family, however, is not entirely accurate. Each of my family members has had a unique impact on me. For starters my father’s father, whom I called ‘Opa’, kept a lot of artifacts and records from our family’s past, and often would regale me with stories about his father and grandfather when I went to visit him. He would drive me past the barber shop my great grandmother used to own, or show me pictures of old family gatherings in the backyard and carefully point out and name everyone in the photograph, always adding a little explanation of what they did for work and specifically how I was related to them. He would specifically talk about my great grandfather and great-great grandfather and the sacrifices that they made, how they started with nothing and worked to provide their children with a better life. I saw for myself how him and my father had continued my tradition, and I decided at a young age that I would not be the one to end it. He also spoke of my German heritage, how my family are direct descendants of German nobles. I still have a picture of the family crest that he gave me. Since then, early on, I began reading books he gave me and in my free time reading about both German culture and history as well as the European Middle Ages. I wanted to get a good idea of where I came from, and what my ancestors were like. This led to me developing a significantly stronger connection to my family and heritage than most of my peers seemed to have, and I saw myself as destined to be a hardworking family-man like the Fausts had been for generations before. Thus I often encounter situations where I am more aware of the culture of my people and my family, and even history in general, than most of my peers. I have taken it upon myself to learn more about these topics, reading more about them in my free time, and find myself talking about it more and more with my peers. It is a topic that excites me, that I love sharing, and even hearing about the topic of this paper made my ears perk up. I have become a producer and consumer of cultural and historical knowledge through the influence of my family, and this is a trait I hope I never lose.

 

 

I was turned onto an entirely different realm of interest my freshman year of high school when we were assigned Fahrenheit 451. I fell in love in dystopian novels, and eventually read Anthem by Ayn Rand. I liked her writing style, and eventually worked up to reading Atlas Shrugged, her eleven hundred and forty-three-page magnum opus. I read the book over the course of six months, the whole time absolutely enthralled by it. I clung to every page, and was absorbed by every character and location. But nothing resonated with me more than the lessons that lied at the core of the novel. The mantra of everyone being free to work for themselves and collect the fruits of their labor, of those who worked hard being the ones who succeeded, spoke to me like nothing had. The framework for these lessons being shown is a hypothetical world in the process of falling apart, not from any major disaster, but from people Rand labels as “looters”, people who gain power and money off the backs of others, people who create nothing and passively destroy everything. This fictional world also spoke to me, as I saw a lot of parallels between it and the one that I live in. I began to become a lot more concerned and interested in social sciences and politics, and ever since I spend my free time either listening to podcasts, watching videos, or reading news articles about current events and politics. I also can’t keep my mouth shut about these topics, and will constantly talk to my friends or anyone who will engage me in conversation about current events and what they think of the state of the nation and world. Other’s view on these events always fascinate me, as they themselves are parts of these issues and social systems. And as Donald Murray argues, all writing is autobiographical. He claims that no matter the purpose or reason for writing, the same personal voice is present constantly. I think this claim is very accurate, as I find myself constantly looking behind the text to try and analyze the writer and their personal opinions that leak into the writing and their hidden biases. These realizations have made me a large consumer and producer of knowledge about these issues, as I am constantly listening to more information from people, drawing new information from everything I read, and talking to others about my views and thoughts.

 

This combination of my literacies of both the past through my heritage and culture as well as the present and future through politics and current events has, in my opinion, made me pretty well rounded. I am constantly drawing connections through these related literacies and using the information I gather to form my own opinion about events, people, and ideas. I am proud of what my literacies have made me, and my love of debate and conversation will ensure that I remain a large producer of knowledge about whatever literacies I maintain throughout my life, especially about my heritage and society.

 

Secondary Source:

 

Murray, Donald M. “All Writing is Autobiography.” College Composition and communication 42.1 (1991):66-74. Print.

 

 

literacy-final-draft

Classwork 11-1

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Malcolm X became traditionally literate through almost sheer willpower, by using all the free time prison provided him and using it to memorize words and practice handwriting first, and once his vocabulary was expanded he began reading traditional educational literature. This eventually gave him power in places he never had any, among people he hadn’t been able to reach and connect with before using only his slang and speech. He gained new power in the form of knowledge that allowed him to further his agenda by formulating new arguments based on new information he had gained as well as enabling him to improve his previous arguments and back them up with things he had learned from the texts he had read. Having all of the information, especially on history, from the books he had read gave him credibility among higher educated people and non-educated people alike.

Homework 10/31

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Knowledge is power in the sense that it informs actions. Educated people with more knowledge understand more situations more in depth than others, so they can often take more informed actions that are more likely to make a given scenario play out in their favor. Therefore, those with more access to knowledge have more power, and are more able to turn things in their favor.

Classwork for 10/31

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My Literacy Sponsors

The Boy Scouts of America and my participation in it has been a large sponsor for me. Every since I was five I have been spending a lot of time out doors, and I have both developed a literacy for camping as well as a love of nature. It has indirect and sometimes direct influences on my writing, and I have often tried to describe in writing the feeling I get outside.

 

Any Rand and specifically Atlas Shrugged have been by far some of my biggest literacy sponsors. I first read the book my Junior year of high school, and have now read it twice. The ideals and morals contained in the book as well as the story and the characters connected to me in a way nothing ever had before, or has since, and has without a doubt subtly made my writing more similar to hers.

 

My high school physics teacher, Dr. Oancea, has been a literacy sponsor for me. Her traditional yet broad outlook on the world has influenced me and  helped me develop a love for physics. No Teacher has ever affected me as much as she has.