Gerard Falzarano

UWRT 1102
Midterm Assignment

Reflecting on this semester and my experience in the 1102-writing

course so far, Ive expanded my knowledge of rhetorical awareness,
independent inquiry, the writing process, revisions, and self-learning.
Improving on these key concepts gave me a boost of confidence in my
writing process and research plans. The rhetorical strategies we went
over in class which are Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, gave me an
understanding of how to implement emotion, reason and logistics to
make my writing appeal to more audiences and persuade them more
effectively. Prior to my 1101 course last semester, I had little
knowledge about rhetorical awareness and the 3 rhetorical devices. My
knowledge of the subject of rhetoric was backed only by what I learned
in my high school video production class where we analyzed the
rhetorical devices used in particular scenes of movies. The ways of
persuading an audience of a film and an audience of an article or book
are very similar. Both require the use of emotion, credibility, and
logistics to catch the particular audiences interest.
The assignment I believe Ive learned the most from is the
Independent Inquiry Project. Working on forming my inquiry question
naturally improved my independent thinking skills and spending
tedious amount of time researching possible sources forced me to

practice researching. One of the perks of our project being

Independent is that every topic we write about, idea we formulate,
question we ask, is a product of self-learning and independent
research. The feeling of having total control over the assignment
motivates me to learn because it instills a sense of freedom. We are
allowed to research and write about whatever we so desire so I chose
to do something with music, which I love. My original inquiry question
began to develop as I pondered on a couple of thoughts floating in my
head. Why do people enjoy music so much? Why do different people
like different kinds of music? How does the brain interpret music?
These questions puzzled me ever since I started playing the guitar
learning different keys, notes and rhythms. My initial plan started with
researching something I already knew which was The Mozart Effect.
Reading through a couple of articles I eventually found other helpful
sites that brought me to sources explaining the benefits of learning an
instrument at an early age linked to spatial-temporal reasoning. From
here I began to formulate my Inquiry question: How does listening and
learning music affect the brain?
The key concepts that are most challenging to me are critical
thinking, researching and getting out of my comfort zone. When I
research, the majority of the time I find myself always relying on
Google to find my sources. As Prof. Ingram pointed out responding to
one of my questions, Google can be extremely helpful but most of the

scholarly articles Google provides are not made public. It seems so

daunting having to scan databases to try to find sources and most of
the time I am left with nothing but frustration. Researching is an
acquired skill and takes a lot of practice to get good. I plan to
improve my research skills by setting aside a span of time, lets say 30
minutes, and devote it solely to database research and scholarly
journals. This will pave the road to a more professional annotated
bibliography. Along with research, as I stated before, my critical
thinking skills are lacking. Reading a passage with very dry and boring
text will usually end with me saying, I cant remember what I just
read. This thought pops into my head too much. What Ive learned
from professors over the years that works best is to use footnotes that
summarize each paragraph of text highlighting important information.
Along with summaries, writing down questions and random thoughts
about the reading help with the evaluation and processing of the
passage.
Overall, this semester along with the last has proved to be a big
step in improving my writing and researching. Ive noticed myself
becoming more independent with my research thinking more out of
the box than previous years. I hope to improve more upon my critical
thinking skills in the future, as it is crucial when interpreting text. I am
excited to see where the rest of my college journey takes me and I look

forward to applying the key concepts I learned in UWRT 1102 in my

writing.