1MadarangAlex MadarangRWS 280 Section 30Lecturer Sager28 April
2014
Reflection Essay: RWS 280Throughout my academic career at San
Diego State University, I have been required to take a number of
writing courses, from which I have learned many different skills
and strategies and have utilized them in many of my other classes
over the past few years. In this essay, I will recall the
strategies I learned in the RWS classes I took during my freshman
year, as well as the areas in which I struggled, and reflect on how
my experiences in Rhetoric and Writing Studies 100 and 200 affected
my performance in future classes and the Writing Placement
Assessment (WPA). Afterwards, I will discuss the many different
ways in which you, Lecturer Sager, have helped me improve in areas
that I still struggled with in addition to refreshing and enhancing
the skills I already acquired. Furthermore, I will consider how the
improvement of my rhetoric and writing skills will not only aide me
in future classes, but have an impact on my life as whole.During my
freshman year at San Diego State University, I took two classes
called RWS 100 and RWS 200. Throughout both courses, my professors
provided me with the resources necessary to learn and understand
the rhetorical process of writing and analyzing a text. Ethos,
pathos, and logos were the foundation for those classes as it is
for all Rhetoric and Writing classes. Both of my professors taught
me how to structure a rhetorical essay by starting with a prcis and
stating my thesis followed by three body paragraph that dissect the
chosen text and discuss the authors appeal to ethos, pathos, and
logos. Although they were great professors, I felt as though the
content chosen by these professors to be very dry and not something
that I took any joy in researching and writing about. For example,
my professor in RWS 200 had the class rhetorically analyze the
Federalist Papers, as well as many other texts covering subjects
from the same time period, in which those documents were created.
In retrospect, I think that if the subject matter of those writing
classes were different I would have been more engaged in class and
would have retain more.As my freshman year came to a close, a
couple of the things that I continued to struggle with were my
ability to put together a well written prcis and writing a clear
thesis statement. I feel as though my struggles with the prcis and
thesis statement were often what led to my papers being left
disorganized, jumping from idea to idea with no real in-depth
analysis of the arguments presented in the chosen works. In the
semesters leading up to the Writing Placement Assessment, many of
the essays required of me in other classes did not call for
analyzing the subject rhetorically, but instead were more
research-based. As is the case with most things, I lost many of the
skills I acquired during my first RWS courses because I did not
practice them on a regular basis, or at all for that matter. In
addition, the areas that I struggled with only worsened over time.
During the WPA, I can recall thinking to myself how easy the prompt
was, but I struggled with it because I could not remember the basic
structure of a rhetorical essay, including the prcis and thesis
statement. After receiving a 6 on the WPA, I was required by the
university to take two writing courses: RWS 280 and RWS 305W.Right
from the start, your Rhetoric and Writing Studies 280 class
refreshed my memory with many of the things that I learned during
my freshman year. While working on our first project, things began
to feel familiar as I worked on dissecting Selling in Minnesota,
from Barbara Ehrenreichs Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in
America. After submitting my rough draft, I received a number of
notes from you on things to consider when revising my essay,
including condensing certain ideas and sentences, avoiding slang
terms, and restating a persons title with each new paragraph, which
was an issue that presented itself in a lot of my essays during my
earlier RWS classes. On the other hand, you commented on how nice
certain parts of my introduction and prcis were, which just goes to
show how your teaching styles were already more effective in
helping me improve my writing skills. After receiving your notes,
and seeing how other students structure their papers during our
workshop, I had a better understanding of how to revise my paper.
After submitting and receiving a grade back on my final paper, I
noticed that you made note of a couple sentence fragments
throughout my paper, as well as my tendency to jump between ideas,
which affected the fluidity in some of my paragraphs. If Im being
honest with myself, the reason that things tend to get jumbled when
I write papers can be attributed to my tendency to procrastinate.
Although some of the same issues mentioned in Project 1 were still
present in the subsequent projects, I did feel as though I was
struggling a little more with the second project. In Project 2, you
challenged us in a completely new and different way by requiring us
to compare Platos Allegory of the Cave, to a more modern
representation of that same concept and discuss the similarities
and differences among the arguments presented in both of the texts.
In my opinion, Platos work, or any sort of philosophy for that
matter, is a very difficult subject to wrap my head around. Along
with rhetorically analyzing a visual text, which was a skill that
not many people had acquired prior to your class, I found it very
challenging to form a cohesive essay that was an accurate
representation of both writers texts and their arguments. Granted,
I do think that was partially due to my movie choice. Crash is a
film that has many different twists and turns, as well as many
different points of views. Even though I had watched the film a few
times prior to this project, I had a very hard time grasping the
main points in this movie and, therefore, had difficulty making
clear and concise comparisons between the two texts. Towards the
end, I did realize I might have, as they say, bitten off more than
I could swallow.On the contrary, I do feel that by the time Project
3 came around the idea of breaking down a visual text was no longer
a completely foreign concept to me. I noticed that I used many of
the strategies and ways in which you encouraged us to think while
analyzing visual texts. As was the case with Crash, I noticed after
re-watching Super Size Me a few times that I was catching some
things that I had not noticed before. Years ago, when I first
watched the documentary, I wasnt taking into consideration the
directors main purpose or argument, or how the creation of the film
may have been a result of a much larger conversation that was
already taking place in our society and government. As a result,
watching a film or documentary with these things in mind allows you
to get a better grasp of what a film is really about and you gain
more knowledge on the subjects presented in it.As a whole, I feel
that the skills that were built and strengthened during your class
will be valuable in my future as I approach the end of my
undergraduate career and move on to building a career for myself.
The different ways you challenged us to break down texts provided
me with a different method of viewing and understanding certain
things. Moving forward, as I encounter new materials, whether they
are audial, visual or textual, I will be able to understand and
better grasp the messages and ideas presented in different types of
medias. In contrast, as mentioned in previous paragraphs, I realize
that many of the issues and errors I made in my essays could have
been avoided had I not procrastinated. Taking more time to focus on
a paper allows you to be more calm during the writing process and
ultimately will result in a more cohesive, well-thought-out essay
with a clearer representation of the claims being made and the
evidence to support them. Going forward, I will make it a goal of
mine to work on my procrastination and hopefully, as a result, my
papers will show an improvement in regards to the organization and
execution of the ideas used throughout my essays.
