Guerrero 1

Brittany J. Guerrero Professor Nathan Cole English 1010-078 30 April 2014 Course Reflection

It was very interesting taking English 1010 this semester. I remember back in high school when English was my best subject and it came very easily. All that English was back then was understanding what you read, learning proper grammar and writing a book report every once in a while. I was in for a surprise when I started English this last semester. The entire course was about writing essays about rhetoric and doing research papers. It was most definitely an eye opener. I am very grateful to have taken this course my very first semester at SLCC because if I had not, I would have struggled horrible in my other courses that require research paper. This course connected with all of my courses at SLCC. For example, one of my first weeks in my English course, we were taught about rhetoric and rhetorical sensitivity. Of course these large words made absolutely no sense to me at the time, and I wondered why they even mattered and when I would ever even use this new found knowledge; within a few days of learning about rhetoric, there seemed to be a trend, because suddenly I was hearing that word in my art class and even my communications course. I learned very quickly that I would find a use for rhetoric. Eventually I was writing about ethos and pathos and logos in all my courses. It became very apparent how rhetoric is important in art; as it is the reason it was created. Also, for my communications course, it helped with some of my papers regarding jobs and resumes and dealing with people in the work place, or in school.

Guerrero 2

Because of this course, I was able to practice rhetorical sensitivity in most aspects of my life. With all my research papers, I had to use a lot of ethos in them to even make my paper effective. Another element that was used in my papers for my communications class was pathos. That class is all about developing interpersonal skills for all aspects of life. One particular assignment where rhetoric was helpful was on my resume. I thought that my resume was good before but it definitely was a lot better after applying my new found skills of rhetoric, I would say that my resume is awesome now. I am able to target my resume toward the employer now, rather than just write about my skills. I was able to develop my writers voice because of what I learned in this course. In the past, I had only ever written book reports; nothing where I could express myself. I had been limited to summarizing stories and writing a brief description of what I learned from the book. Writing analysis and research papers helped me define who I am as a writer. Overall, this course is probably the most important course of all the general education courses because of all the fundamentals that are taught. English 1010 is literally a building block for all other courses at SLCC. If it werent required, I would be recommending it to all students, but it looks like the academic advisors already have.