Eden

During this class, I learned a lot about how to improve my writing process. I broke down what I have done in the past as I wrote and learned what I could improve on and what has worked for me in the past that I can continue to implement. I really enjoyed when we did the hands-on activities. I learn best when I can actually practice what we are working on so I had fun during those in-class activities. I wish we had more of those to break up some of the lecture time. It was difficult for me on some days to stay focused on the days we just had a lecture. By taking breaks by doing activities, it helped me stay focused and on task.   

My writing process has greatly improved since the beginning of this class. I am more organized and not as stressed about my first draft. I take breaks in between writing drafts and it has helped a lot. I have three final papers due during exam week so I will be writing a lot in the weeks to come. I have already implemented organization methods (outline, brainstorming document, resource list that are all trustworthy) as I begin my papers and have seen a difference in both my writing and attitude towards writing these papers. 

I think the most difficult part of the semester for me was the rhetorical analysis. It was difficult for me to find the pieces of the article that was worth analyzing and which parts to leave out of the assignment. It did give me a deep understanding of the topic and made me care more because I had a lot more information from the analysis. I feel like my writing process has improved because I am more thoughtful of how I organize everything. It makes a big difference for me if everything is organized from the beginning. I feel like I can write better papers and I am way more focused and less time is wasted organizing later. 

In the original argument, the article talked about food insecurity during breaks where the dining hall would close. I expanded on the idea and talked about food insecurity on campus overall. I wanted to show in my infographic how big the problem was and give a visual representation of it through graphs and graphics. 

I found how important it was to check for bias in an article. Writers and journalists can sometimes hide their bias in their writing and in result, you can’t always tell there even is bias. It is important that you know where your resource is coming from, who wrote it, and that it is all credible. Always checking the domain and how the website looks is something that has become routine with me since high school. The media bias website is really cool and I know I’ll be using it a lot in the future. I now am always making sure I know this information so even if I know there is bias in the articles, I can still attain the information and use it to form my own ideas. 

- Counterargument: Universities can’t afford to keep the dining halls open during breaks. It would just make tuition higher and that wouldn’t be any better. 

I found this image on the article I did my rhetorical analysis on: “It’s Hard to Be Hungry on Spring Break”. The audience of this article was the universities and people involved in universities. The author wanted to connect with them and make them think about how some students really struggle when dining halls close for breaks. This image depicts a student with an empty tray trying to get in the dining hall there is a gate around it. This is definitely using the rhetorical appeal pathos. It wants to make the reader feel the helplessness the student is feeling when they can’t get access to food. This image uses contrast in the way it uses light and the colors (particularly the student’s bright red pants against the plain colored setting). There is a visible barrier that both blocks the student from the dining hall and separates the image into two sections. One one side we have the student and light and on the other side we have the dining hall and darkness. This image portrays beautifully how hard it is to be without food when you are a student at a university that promised to keep you fed. It brings the reader into the situation more because they have a visual representation of the problem. 

In my article, the author uses a lot of descriptive words to introduce the quotes. This is one of the main ways he uses pathos in this article. He explains how the quote was said in regards to feelings and facial expressions which made the article feel a lot more personal. I really liked that he did this because it is one thing to read the quote but it is another to know the feeling behind the quote. It is more relatable. I don’t think I will be able to use this technique in my paper unless I’m quoting how the author wrote the introduction in the article. I can use other words besides “write” or “said” though that are more descriptive. 

I have had peer reviews in the past and they were sometimes helpful. The ones that were most helpful, pointed out my sentence structure and asked me to rewrite a sentence or two that didn’t really make sense. It was also helpful to hear what did make sense to them and what to replicate in other parts of the paper. They could also point out incorrect grammar and punctuation that I had missed in my past revisions. I did like more than one person reading over my paper because it gave me a wider field of what to work on or what was done right. 

The main rhetorical appeal the author of my article used was pathos. They describe through imagery what it is like for college students that can’t afford food outside of the meals they get at school. The author wanted you to walk in their shoes for a couple minutes to really get their point across of how important dining halls are and how there should be more in the decision to close them for a season or holiday. They also use ethos a lot when it comes to the article. They have perspectives speak of students that are struggling with food insecurity. The author also has people that are studying a topic related to this speak on the issue. I think both of these appeals were extremely useful when it came to the topic and were successful in the article.