It has been a nice quarter of growth and learning in terms of writing good pieces of literature and producing media that has an impact on a target audience.  It has helped me fine-tune my writing technique, and allowed me to learn more about myself and my writing ability.  The essays, the lectures, the short responses, and the discussions helped me convey what I want in writing faster, in a more calculated fashion, with more efficiency.  It raised the bar for me on providing more quality pieces of writing in a short period of time.  

To be completely honest, the first half of the quarter, in this class, given it was asynchronous, I would typically do assignments last minute and procrastinate, but once the classes started being in-person, I became more attentive and focused (but the procrastination persisted).  There are stages of this class that I can remember; discussion responses, then short responses, then the major essays and their revisions, with some short responses inside there.  Having those discussion responses near the beginning and the increasing amount of coursework as the quarter went on really help me acclimatize and broke the chain of the ineffective and lazy writing that I used to do in high school that was often busy-work and lacked substance.  The readings and lectures were insightful and gave a refreshing view that is often left out in popular culture.  Below it gives more specifics on the pieces of the rhetorical introduction:

Composition Process

Overall, the way I brainstormed was through reflection.  Sometimes I would just get off the computer, go outside for a couple of minutes, or just move away from my setting into someplace different and that's where a lot of my brainstorming came into real-life.  I would often try brainstorming while sitting there on my computer, but it wouldn't work as good as it did when I would take myself out of the computer setting,  Sometimes I just wouldn't get any ideas until I took a break and the idea would just pop up in my mind while taking a break. I would typically work on my projects or assignments the night they were due typically 2-3 hours before they were due and that used to be a big motivator for me to get the assignments done quick.  When I sat there, knowing it was due very soon, it got me pumping ideas like I never would have had the assignment been due later.  When I would sit down to write something, I would look through the samples, the assignment description, and rubric until I got a good sense of how things were supposed to be (just like for this ePortfolio), and then started writing. Then I would occasionally look at the assignment description and examples to affirm I was doing it right and eventually go deep into the writing and have that flow of ideas going through and being actualized by my fingers on the keyboard.  After completing the paper, I would look at it, and review it about 3 times, or whatever I had energy for, and then submit it.  Beforehand, I would also make sure to fine-tune the organization, rather than doing a pre-planned outline, although my essays and paragraphs would follow a general skeleton structure that I would have in my mind after looking through the examples and assignment requirements.

Scholarly essays played a decent role in the generation of ideas, since they often spurred some good ideas and provided some quotations to add to essays, so it helped out a little bit.  Sometimes, the scholarly essays could be too wordy though and clumped up, so I wouldn't fully process the material but still take clips of it into my writing to supplement my own writing if I had the time, or if there was a requirement.

Rhetoric and Argumentation

Logos, pathos, and ethos were things that I included into my works.  I was able to find the right balance of logos, pathos, and ethos in my writing to make sure that I would keep my ethos as a writer, but also ensure a proper balance of pathos and logos was put into there. Some of the course material, such as the scholarly essays like David Dicken's "Rings, Belts, and a Bird's Nest", helped provoke new ideas and their works would be added to my essay which would add the logos element, and also incorporate more ethos into my work.  A lot of the stuff also had to deal with pathos though, since much of the substance of my writing was initially text, but later, I would add sources and logos to increase my ethos, rather than just simply pathos that would be found with my writing, or traces of logos and ethos. The pathos element could also be harmful, if not paired with enough logos, so I had to develop a careful balance to make sure my writing would include both in the right way.  Inside the RIP project essay, I would quickly google up some sources for me to use to boost my ethos, and I would insert them where it seemed fit and that would also increase my logos and decrease existing pathos and help keep it balanced.  I found that news articles were the easiest and quickest to find, and the Pew Research center was a good resource that helps increase the logos portion a bit as well.

Revision Process

The way I would deal with my revision process is by identifying the things I was missing (and often I already knew before what was missing).  I would often organize and split up things more in the higher level, edit specific portions, but I wouldn't go deep into revisiting and completely redoing my essay.  This helped ensure that I would revise the essay without completely redoing it.  I realized that the rough draft, or previous draft was coming from a different train of thought than I was having during revision, and would often remove the grammatically incorrect portions.  I would also improve the content and add things that were missing.  Peer reviews were a bit helpful as well, although I only received peer reviews my rhetorical analysis essay. The professors critique was very helpful and helped point me in the right direction, especially when I wouldn't exactly know if I was following the prompt well enough.  

Knowledge Transfer

Some strength I've discovered about myself as a writer this quarter include that I can write quickly and creatively if I give myself enough time. I already knew before that I had a zone where I could write well.  This quarter I reinforced that the best time I am in this zone where ideas come quickly is closer to the time assignments are due so I helped structure my writing process that way since it would also help free up my schedule for other tasks I had.  Some weaknesses I noticed about myself is that when I was tired, it was increasingly difficult to fully understand the meaning of a scholarly essay or what a writing prompt was asking me to do. Once I understood what I actually needed to do, and developed a skeleton template of how to structure whatever writing I was doing in my mind, the process was easy afterwards for the most part, and that is a strength of mine that I have noticed.