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Amber Atkinson
Weaver
Rhetoric 1
Nov. 28, 2014
Reflection
This semester has been fun and hard all rolled into one. I have had to try to balance
meeting and remembering new people, and having to complete papers and chemistry
homework. This class has been especially bothersome, as I have had to keep up with
numerous readings and writing assignments while at the same time working and doing
homework for my other classes. Rhetoric was like hiking a mountain for the entire semester,
we started fairly easy at a brisk walk up a slight incline when we began work on our literary
narratives. As the semester progressed to discourse communities the slope got steeper and our
pace up the mountain became slow, but our pace picked up as we came to a plateau. Then
when we reached rhetorical analyses we ran, we ran up the rest of the mountain as we could
see the top in sight. The slope was the steepest we had come to throughout the semester and it
was hard, but still we ran.
At the beginning of our hick up the mountain I saw the class as any easy thing to
accomplish, but I was wrong. My thoughts about many of the topics in class haven't really
changed. I still see literacy as being able to read and write and to take meaning from spoken
and written word, but. The only way my position on literacy effects my other classes is that I
have to be able to understand my professors when then speak or write and I have to be able to
write for assignments and notes, and have to read my assignments. They have been shown by

my understanding of the assignments and thus gaining good grades for my work in the class.
I have always thought of myself as a fairly good reader, for a person with dyslexia. After
taking this class, however, I am reminded that I'm not on the same level as everyone else. I
have noticed that a lot of other students haven't had to try really hard or they had the luxury
of growing up in an academically rich environment, I didn't everything I have achieved was
through my perseverance, especially my reading. Though I still see myself as a pretty good
reader, I think I would benefit more from less academic readings to improve my skills and
vocabulary.
My writing has never been close to exceptional to me, I have a hard time getting started
and keeping a good flow to my papers. Even in my non-academic pieces I have found them
very childish, as if I can't use better more sophisticated words to relay my message to my
audience. I can write well enough to get my assignments done, but I want to be better. As of
now I only write notes, papers, lists and other academia related items. Maybe if I was given
more time to express myself the way I want to instead of teachers and parents continuously
telling me to write something, I've really lost all interest in writing.
There have been a lot of assignments in this class, readings and writings, and it has been
hard to keep up with the demands of working and attending school full time. It was especially
hard when we had a paper, a quiz, a writing response and working all due at the same time. I
would have to say that I only enjoyed doing the literary narrative at the beginning of the
semester. We had more time to work on this paper than the others and we discussed how it
was written and what it was. The ethnography was very difficult as we were kind of
stumbling along not knowing exactly what we were supposed to be writing about. The

rhetorical analysis seemed very rushed, we spent a few class periods talking about and
analyzing commercials, but only having a week to accomplish a first draft and then only three
days to revise pushes most college students to the edge, most of us have four or five classes a
semester with papers, tests, and presentations to do in them as well.
After class on discourse communities I would define genre as a type of writing or writing
style. I found the overall topic of discourse communities as hard and strenuous, but analyzing
the community was probably the hardest thing for me in that unit; whilst the definitions were
the easiest especially since they tend to cross between my classes. Learning about discourse
communities might have been considered interesting or helpful to some, but other than
helping me understand why certain things happen in Aramark this unit didnt exactly transfer
over to my other classes except that it interfered with getting homework done in a timely
manner. That being said I do wish I could have completed the third draft of my paper instead
of catching up on chemistry homework.
In the last unit we discussed texts and what they were. I originally thought texts where
just written words that sometimes appear with images. I have learned that texts also include
images; however I dont agree; I still cant grasp the idea of an image being a text. I see our
definition of texts as too broad, and should not include everything that a meaning can be
found in otherwise we might as well consider buildings a form of text. Buildings are
considered a form or art to some and can express a meaning towards a particular group of
people, but are not inherently thought of as texts. If I was rhetorically analyzing something
that I traditionally see as a text, such as a book, I would feel very comfortable analyzing it;
however analyzing a commercial was very difficult and greatly outside of my comfort zone, I

had no idea as to even where to begin. Even though I didnt know exactly what to do, I felt
somewhat proud of the fact that I didnt just see the surface. I was able to do a more in depth
analysis than I originally thought possible for myself looking back over my analyses of
school books.