Shoukr, Ahmed

10/12/15
Draft-like thing of rhetorical analysis 2
Writer, Amy E. Robillard, in her essay, Its time for class: toward a more complex
pedagogy of narrative, recounts about her personal experiences with time, growing up with four
siblings and a single mother who had an obsession with time. She uses her own story to explore
the personality in academic writing with the purpose of establishing that there are different ways
of conceiving time which are always influenced by the class from which someone originally
comes. She uses a vulnerable, yet authoritative tone in order to appeal more personally to her
mostly student and teacher audience in academia while maintaining that her assertions come
from a lot of experience and logical thinking that she put into her essay. Moreover, she uses a
wide variety of authors as examples of people that agree with her and she disproves those that do
not. Therefore, she maintains a personal tone with the audience while keeping in mind that her
assertions are not just applicable to her because of her experiences, but to everyone around in
academia as well.
First, Robillard begins her essay with discussing the problems of the world where we live
and how personal writing in academics can help students become more class conscious and in
order to provide them with a narrative that they can use throughout the rest of their lives by
instilling values and ethics that are personal and unique because they align and make sense with
the narrative. Robillard asks our students have come this far, inching their way toward the
middle class of the University; why not use this opportunity to help them move a little bit closer?
Why not and still numb the valleys of middle class, values like delay gratification and
punctuality (88) in order to show her understanding of why teachers may chose to not pay
attention to students narratives and try to instil new ones in them. However, if students can give
up their affiliation with their older class, then how can they be expected to have any core values?
Robillard writes during a time where a fast-growing capitalist economy often forces people to do
things outside of their comfort zone in order to keep pace with everyone else. To illustrate, up
until recently, I used to work at Frys Electronics as a computer salesman. Basically, I gave many
customers very bad deals, with computers that I knew would not last, selling them performance
service contracts which are warranties that rarely apply so they are pure profit, and other things a
customer does not need. A customer would walk in and come out spending more than double
what they came to spend and somehow feel good about it when in reality they got screwed and I
came out with a lot of commission. It made me feel horrible but I was not sure if I was supposed
to be doing this because it is what I had to do or if I should never do so. I decided to quit my job
because I did not feel like a good person. Robillard argues that writing a narrative about oneself,
telling someones history in a creative and constructive way, could help them avoid many
mistakes and dilemmas they could face because they know their place and what they should and
should not do.
Furthermore, Robillard is addressing a wide range of people in acadamia, including
teachers and students, from all kinds of backgrounds and social classes. Specifically, Robillard
proposes that, as writing teachers, we make more explicit in our classrooms the ways that
narrative and the more privilege genres of analysis and arguments enter animate one another
(77). In this way, she is addressing teachers to give a larger space for narratives in the classroom,
arguing that they are just as complex and difficult to write as research papers and other forms of
writing can become. She argues that time in essence is viewed through a lens created by ones
social class and therefore, teachers should be able to focus on personal writing in the classroom

just as much as they focus on other forms of writing and research papers. Robillard believes
telling stories of the past involves selection and interpretation. The choice to tell a story of the
past is a rhetorical one (79). Thus, writing narratives can be as difficult as any other form essay
writing because it requires a person to pick and choose stories from their past to tell a narrative.
In addition, Robillard goes on to show narratives can provide for much more meaningful
discussion. Robillard further shows how narratives can align with her belief that academic
writing should be abstract by asking without the stories, without the concrete, from what might
one abstract? If academics are looking for a good discussion, why would they not want
narratives told when they can provide basis for this discussion. To further illustrate her point that
narratives are rhetorical, and can depend greatly on the how they are told and their interpretation,
Robillard discusses how growing up with her mother who is always on time led her to become
the same way while leading her sister to become the exact opposite: late for her own funeral.
While successful people often like to tell their life story about how hard they have
worked, people who have not made it yet spend so little time thinking about the development of
class-consciousness .. trying so hard to escape the working class (15). Robillard argues that it is
fundamentally important that people are able to talk about their background in an academic
setting and not only discuss it after they become successful because it is a battle in progress, not
something that is just for the individual. To make it clear, she draws a parallel between
discussion of background and discussion of students street slang as a creative, oppositional use
of language. Robillard suggests that this is perhaps because students have come this far why
not use this opportunity to help them move a little bit closer (16). Therefore, lack of discussion
of narrative also comes out of the view that it somehow hinders progress but Robillard argues
that discussion of narrative actually helps people become more successful, and when they are,
they can better identify with the values and shared interests with the class they came from and
allow them to grow higher affiliation and purpose with that class.
In conclusion, Robillard calls for reexamination of the significance of personal
narratives to more privileged genres like analysis and argument because personal writing
depends heavily on the way stories are chosen to tell a specific narrative, and in turn, how that
narrative is interpreted. Robillard uses a variety of views from other authors to show how
narratives influence the view of time because they help people understand where they come
from.