Jannat 1

Sadia Jannat

Professor Hatfield

ENGL.1302.SCHS1

05/01/19

Reflective essay

The essay that I have decided to choose for this portfolio is the very first essay, the

rhetorical analysis. I chose this essay because it taught me the most about effective

communication, mostly since it helped me to write professionally without presenting an opinion.

This is so, because this essay is an analysis of a famous speech, thus the purpose of writing it

was to breakdown the rhetorical devices the speaker uses to convince an audience. The speech

that I picked was the “Cuban Missile Crisis” by John F. Kennedy and the three standard

rhetorical devices I identified in the speech are pathos, ethos, and logos and my progress helped

me to determine that this essay helped me to learn the most about professional writing.

In general, this essay was easy to write and was a great start to the course. When I first

received the assignment guidelines for this essay, I was a bit worried because it was the first

assignment of English 1302 and I remembered feeling really overwhelmed when I was writing

the rhetorical analysis essay in English 1301 last semester. In fact, in 1301, I felt that the

rhetorical analysis essay writing process was not explained properly and that the topic choice

was too broad. However, writing it this semester was much easier, because the topic was

specific, and I felt more guided in the process. At first, I was worried about how the essay would

turn out, but once I understood the format of writing each of the paragraphs, I was able to apply

my knowledge quite well. I picked pathos, ethos, and logos as my rhetorical devices because
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they were the only ones present in the “Cuban Missile Crisis” speech and thus, it was easy to

give evidence to support and explain them. My rough draft of this essay mostly included

grammatical errors that were easy to fix, so my final draft was very easy to edit. Therefore, I

earned a high score and positive feedback for this assignment.

As a writer, I learned that writing a rhetorical analysis is quite simple if done following

the proper guideline and that my writing was done following a basic format. Basically, I had to

identify the rhetorical devices in the speech which my body paragraphs talked about in detail and

my thesis simply stated what those rhetorical devices were. Otherwise, my paper was a basic

five-paragraph essay that wrote in a relatively short amount of time. With that said, in the future,

I hope to be able to write more comfortably and skillfully. As of now, I am good at following a

guideline when writing papers. However, I would like for myself to express my writing style

more and be better at explaining my claims, so that my papers are more coherent and organized.

In conclusion, writing this essay helped me to gain a very important essay writing skill

which is to analyze a work of persuasion by its rhetorical elements. Writing this essay also made

me more confident in writing the next two essays in this class and made me more confident in

my writing skills, especially because I received a surprisingly high score on it. Lastly, I hope that

by learning to write this essay, I will have an easier time writing other analysis papers in the

future.