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.

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.

We are all aware of passive or implied claims against us. They can offend or flatter us, and are a big part of how we judge people and analyze how they perceive us. This act is an unavoidable part of human dialogue and is present in all writing, even writing that attempts to be bi-partisan or neutral such as academic writing. In this paper, I will anylize the presence and use of passive claims in the syllabus for  a senior year class for mechanical engineering majors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), “Mechanical Systems Engineering II”. The class is an opportunity for mechanical engineering students to design and build complex machines that solve problems given to them by the professor. Even in a class as open ended as this one, assumptions and claims are made by the professor passively about what their students will be like and what they will need to do. By examining the word choice and use of rhetorical strategies, I will show how the professor of this class and writer of this syllabus passively depicts students as professional, unconcerned with the environment, and educated engineers.

Syllabi are important pieces of literature in the classroom, as they are usually the first primary formal communication from the teacher to the student about the layout, goals, and assignments of the class. Speaking from experience as a student, the moment a student begins reading one, they are trying to find out what the teacher is like. Consciously or unconsciously they are analyzing the layout, structure, word choice, and grading scheme to try and get an idea of how the professor thinks of them and expects them to behave. For example, a professor who thinks of students as lazy may put many graded small assignments in their syllabus to ensure that the students are reading the book or doing practice problems on their own. This is important for a student, as a professor who thinks of students in this light may be more strict and harder to seek help from.

There are clear attempts in the syllabus to model the design process in the class, and more specifically how that effects . Multiple times in both the syllabus and the associated assignment sheet, the professor mentions that they will be examining every aspect of the student’s project along the way, mentioning several organizational methods and documents that will be checked and graded, asking for both a design notebook to be reviewed bi-weekly and monthly status reports (Appendix I 1). The way the author is able to simply ask for a report monthly without specifying any further details shows that the professor is very confident in their student’s ability to make their own decisions about what it is important to discuss with the teacher and how to communicate their decisions and progress in the process of design and construction. This is very business-oriented, and draws many parallels to the design processes for large engineering companies. I have spoken to many mechanical engineers, and they say that the process that occurs during a big design project usually involves the engineers doing their own work with their assigned team, and giving progress reports to their managers at fixed intervals or upon request.The similarities here seem deliberate and intelligent, and function as important stepping stones to the working world. The other main grading points in the class are a design proposal, a final project summary and write up, and an oral presentation about the entire project to a group of various people, including guests and other students. These assessments stray away from normal grading in the mechanical engineering academic world, which is normally limited to tests and essays, and into the way an engineer is ‘graded’ in the real world by their employer and peers; by the quality of their work and the way in which they present both it and themselves.