Octavio Martin

Professor Jackie Way

Writing 39B

3 November 2015

Introduction

              I am aware that I am not the greatest writer, but I will say that my dedication to the first five weeks of the course took a toll on me, but they were very fruitful by helping me notice my weaknesses and weaknesses with my writing. These first five weeks have been like going through hell, but my time input and hard work to the assignments have helped me get out of hell and move up to heaven. My progress and awareness can be seen through critical reading exercises and the process that my rhetorical analysis essay underwent.

             The rhetorical analysis essay was a great method to analyze weaknesses and strengths encapsulated in my writing. One major aspect that I learned to adapt to my writing emanated from the revision process. The drafting process helped me be unbiased towards my own writing by letting go of ideas that didn’t fit in with the overall idea of my argument. I learned (the hard way!) to be honest with my writing and know when ideas are “flawed” or when they disturb the flow and organization of my essay. As my ideas became more compressed to fit Cinderella, paragraphs that spoke about the generality of fairy tales in my first draft weren’t suitable for my final essay, so I had to eliminate them and keep the material that was interesting and relevant. The peer edited also provided some of the hardest face slaps that my writing has received. When I received my peer edited essay, my editor gracefully pointed out my lack of rhetorical analysis regarding Cinderella. At this instant, I realized that my fear from truly expressing my ideas or having them proved as wrong were holding me back. So I grabbed my second edited draft, chose a specific idea within that essay, and wrote about it on random pieces of paper. This helped me brainstorm ideas that helped my essay grow in complexity and it helped clear my thoughts up.

              The RA helped me narrow down my ideas and be more specific to help me support my claims. The first draft I noticed that I was being too broad and that I lacked the main purpose of this project: to analyze rhetorically. My first and second drafts paid particular attention to children, which is one of the components of the rhetorical triangle, but I didn’t quite analyze my chosen tale (Cinderella by the Grimm Brothers) to connect to the purpose, rhetor, and context. Although my claims did support the idea that Cinderella was too violent for children, my topic wasn’t specific enough to only correspond to Cinderella. In other words, I could have used any other tale and my argument of violence and gruesomeness could still hold true. When I realized this, I knew that I had to dig in deeper and try to unearth specific arguments that were more individualized for Cinderella. So I decided to that in order to include context, purpose, audience, and rhetor, I changed my focus from a generality to a specific by talking about the how the Grimms incorporated Ideas and beliefs of the 19^th century in Cinderella.

                 The critical reading exercises were a critical component that helped me discover fairy tale genre conventions. After reading many fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Bluebeard (to name a few) I noticed conventions such as female protagonists, so this led me to analyze Cinderella for its cultural context as well for its continued praise in today’s culture. I profoundly enjoyed our third critical reading exercise, “Rhetors in context,” since it taught me how the author maintained a connection between his culture and his writing through fairy tales conventions. This allowed me to reconsider my second draft of the essay and deviated my attention to context. So by doing this, I grew more aware of the RA expectations and the importance of the rhetorical triangle. I do, however, know that my analysis of the tale floated on the surface, but as I kept reading the tale more engagingly, my analysis developed in complexity. Also, I had trouble trying to find the right words to transcribe my ideas, which proved to be a challenge since I had to verbally express this first and then write them down on paper.

                  Reading the Anteater’s Guide to Rhetoric and Writing also proved to be helpful since it first introduced us to the rhetorical triangle, which is our main focus for the RA. This book was also extremely helpful when it came to source integration. It taught me how to find appropriate sources (in this case secondary scholar sources) and how to integrate them in my writing. Although I feel that my use of sources wasn’t abundant or well applied in my final draft, I would definitely focus on this if I had the opportunity to make any edits. Class and conference notes also proved to be a great resource that demonstrated how I should be taking notes on my reading and how analytically they should be. This notes served me as guideline of the engaging interaction I should be having with the class readings.

              What I could improve and what I am aiming at for the next 5 weeks of the quarter is to think more critically about the readings and apply the rhetorical triangle. I will also attempt to a significant contribution during class. In the more distant future I will be definitely applying this uses of simplicity, unbiased drafting, interactive reading, and note-taking strategies to produce better quality work. One such platform where I will be making such applications will be in writing 39C. This course will require close reading and a myriad of editing processes. Overall, skills like close reading and engaging analysis can be applied to many other course, and I will definitely take advantage of this to apply them for my engineering classes.