Writer’s Journal

Hook, Line, and Sinker

When I use rhetoric, I do it unconsciously without myself even realizing it. When I talk to someone, be it a friend or family member, I first start the conversation calmly. You can’t jump the gun because then my audience will feel differently to how I view things. So I ease in to the subject. For example, I want to get my friend to try out this new game I’ve fallen in love with. I know they would never play the game if I tell them to, so I have to start slow and grab their interest first. I casually start the conversation to talk about what games they’ve played recently. I know that if I talk about myself they wouldn’t be invested in the conversation. Not as much if they were the center of attention, so I talk about their experiences. As time goes by and the conversations steers away from the original topic, I abruptly start talking about the game I had originally wanted to talk about. They might feel confused over the abrupt change, but the heed no concern over the matter. I ask them what they think about ___. They tell me they never played it. That’s my time to start chiming in. Slowly but surely it’s hook, line, and sinker. I’ve piqued their interest and now they’ll start playing. It was done all without him nor I ever realizing it. This could never have been my true thoughts at the time, it’s just too much to think about at the time. All I wanted was to persuade my friend to check out this cool game I’ve been playing. However I had thought back to the conversation and it went like this. It sounds very underhanded but what I’ve realized is that it’s quite normal. In everyday conversation, these ordeal of thoughts wouldn’t sound like so. Nonetheless, this is what it looks like after analyzing my phrases and the reason for saying each and every phrase. In this case I used a combination of rhetorics to persuade my friend for my benefit. My audience was my friend and the message was to persuade them to play this cool new game they wanted to play.

First to start with, I had never really realized the grave consequences rhetoric in writing may have caused. I can still remember using rhetoric in my own writing multiple times because I had wanted to persuade my reader to my side, just like how Roberts-Miller had described. Although I hope to be able to say that I led my readers to the truth, I can’t. I can’t be absolute certain that my opinion is the truth because it’s just an opinion I made. Thus it would mean that I’ve been misleading people with rhetorical writing even if I hadn’t consciously realized it myself. Not only that, I’ve also realized that political speeches of probably all kinds contain lots of rhetoric. I was just recently reading Tom Watson’s essay on Interracial Southern Populism, for a class on Modern American History, and Tom Watson used rhetorics frequently in attempts of persuading his audience to follow his beliefs. Many of the rhetorics were negative because he held a strong racist belief towards black people in his respective time period. In the case of his essay, I believe he had used rhetorics to guide people towards the truth of his beliefs rather than misleading his readers. He wanted his readers to unite politically speaking to thus make a greater impact in the populist campaign. However, in the end Tom Watson had lost the fight. With the defeat the Populist party faced in the late 19th century, came Tom Watson’s defeat as well. In fact, after the populist campaign he had taken a completely opposite side and wished to disenfranchise black people. Tom Watson was just a recent example of the use of rhetorics that I had recently seen. There are countless other politicians that have used rhetorics in their writings as well, whether to mislead viewers or to guide them towards the truth.

Right off the bat I’d like to just say that the habits and experiences from “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” are honestly really essential for not just postsecondary writing but in general as well. Although I haven’t been able to fully experience college-level writing as I’ve only begun, I think many if not all these habits are truly essential for any type of writing. For example curiosity, you need to be curious to give yourself that first boost of desire to learn. Without that boost your attention and desire to learn wanes. You pay less and less attention and you won’t absorb the information you learn as easily as when you truly have the desire to learn. Thus with curiosity at the reigns, engagement follows. The stronger your curiosity for the world is, the more you will naturally keep yourself engaged.  The other habits mentioned are habits that I feel support this desire to learn. Responsibility adds on to your learning so that you may accept and understand when you’ve made a mistake. Thus being able to learn and improve upon such a mistake. Metacognition as well goes along the lines of responsibility. Since responsibility speaks about accepting your own mistakes, metacognition also speaks in terms of the self. Specifically in the department of reflecting on one’s own thinking.

Some of these habits I’ve already practiced, some only recently while others since more childhood. For example metacognition; although I haven’t practiced it to get better in writing specifically, I naturally practiced it to learn to reflect on my decisions and self. If I made a mistake I would naturally think about my involvement in the mistake and all the littlest of details about the situation. After thinking it over I would then accept responsibility for my actions if I had concluded that I myself had committed  the most wrong in that situation. Other situations were when I had tried to make myself curious in wanting to learn something. Honestly, at first it was an attempt to stop falling asleep in history class. I had wanted to try to make myself more curious about history by trying to learn interesting facts about history to try and gain some interest. It half worked for me. I still find history atrociously boring, but at least not to the point where I’ll fall asleep in class or even while reading that awfully boring textbook. I reached a point where my curiosity to learn history will at least allow me retain information easier.

Which brings up the last question, where these habits really do help in my education. After increasing my curiosity to certain subjects I feel as though I  retain a majority of the knowledge. I mostly think its because I hold this desire to learn more about the world that my brain will feel more compelled to retain the information. Honestly, I feel like curiosity is just such an essential habit to train because of how effective it is. It allows you develop goals that you can accomplish because you naturally feel compelled to accomplish said goal to learn more.

 

I think one of the hardest ENG 2100 assignments I’ve had to write, would probably be the 5 page essay draft the literacy narrative. However, my reasoning isn’t because it was five pages long. It’s because I didn’t know how I wanted to organize my thoughts and put it onto paper. I think I could’ve written at least 6-7 drafts of just my introductory paragraph, then some 5-6 drafts per body paragraph. This entire process was just a constant cycle of writing and reading what I wrote altogether and revising. “the topic sentence is alright… but it could be better. Let’s change it. Now the rest of the paragraph doesn’t flow with the topic sentence, let’s delete everything and restart.” Honestly an accurate representation of my mind right here. In addition, I had to think about my story. I didn’t remember all the details of my life experiences so I would just spend days thinking about my experiences with writing. After thinking I wrote them down, but then it didn’t sound so good so delete once again. Eventually I had finished but that wasn’t enough so I continued to write until I finally came up with a satisfactory concluding sentence. Honestly, this wasn’t the hardest writing assignment I’ve done in my life. However, for this class it was definitely a challenge.

Funnily enough, I had already used the writing strategies talked about in these last couple chapters. I hadn’t ever really done any research on the topic but I just came to understand the importance of I. I understood how in normal communication through speech, people would tend to understand you more after sharing similar experiences. Especially experiences in which you feel as though no one else in the world understands. Thus I began to incorporate “I” into my writing to allow for the reader to be able to relate to my feelings, to feel empathy. As well as be able communicate with them as a fellow human being. I felt my writing would begin to sound more welcoming and open if I began to use “I” in my writing, and who would’ve know I would be on the right track

I honestly wouldn’t know what to define a story as, there’s way too many words you could possibly use to describe a story. It could be a fantasy, a dream, regrets, reality, the future, or just pure gibberish and still countless other possibilities. I think every story reflects a unique life the author was able to envision. That author felt the need to share and thus he expressed his views through a story. A story of whatever plot, setting, and characters. However each component would eventually link to the theme of the story that the author had wanted their reader to understand. So I guess, a story could also be defined as a collection of life lessons. Life lessons that authors wanted to share to their readers.

Although I find the term “story” too broad, I think the most important elements of a story would have to be its plot, characters, and empathy. The plot to act as the frame. Characters to support the frame. Empathy to fill in the blanks and connect more deeply with the reader. In my opinion I think empathy is the most important of the three, because if will make the reader the most emotional. When you’ve incited any emotion into the reader then they may remember that piece of literature for their lives to come. Like me, I am one of those readers that was able to feel a strong emotion from literature. It left such an impact on me, I still remember the story and will even go back a re-read that story. Either to relive those emotions or to try and learn more from the story.

Thank you for using Blogs@Baruch!

This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start publishing.

You are using a new WordPress theme that places widgets such as “Recent Posts,” “Recent Comments” and “Archives” in the footer, leaving you maximum space for publishing in this central area. If you prefer to have widgets on the right side of this page, these can be added by going to “Widgets” under the “Appearance” tab in your Dashboard. You can also choose from more than 100 other themes from the “Themes” menu in the Dashboard.

1. Hello there, my name is Daniel Orejuela. My pronouns are he/him. If you have a question about me just ask, I’m a very straightforward person that speaks their mind. So if I may have said something offensive to you please don’t read too much into it because most likely I wasn’t even thinking that far and just said the first thing that came to mind. 
2. My main focus for this class is just trying to improve my writing by either improving punctuation or to improve the tone of my writing. For the punctuation part I mostly have the problem of being unable to understand when it’s an appropriate time to use punctuation marks. Like commas, semi-colons, and colons. On the side of my tone, I tend to always write in a formal format and tone throughout my papers. Automatically, that is my go-to tone whilst writing. I want to change that so that I can try to use different tones throughout my papers so that when you read it doesn’t sound like a research paper. I want to sound approachable to readers so that they feel as though they’re having a normal everyday conversation with someone close.
3. I remember reading in the syllabus that if we communicate to you about needing more time to turn in an assignment that’s totally understandable and that you would help students to catch up on late assignments or to go ahead in the class. About how much time from either side would be acceptable? Like would being 2-3 weeks behind on assignments/projects or 2-3 weeks worth of assignments ahead of schedule be alright? What would be your limits on being behind or ahead, or would there be no limits as long as you can reasonably estimate that a student has enough time to accomplish all the assignments by the end of the course?

One of the rules about writing that I had grown up with was to always talk in the third person when writing any and all papers unless the prompt specifically states otherwise. I still tend to go by this rule in a lot of circumstances which is what I hate because I had slowly developed a writing style that completely repels this rule. My writing style resembling one to where it sounds like I’m having a casual conversation with the reader. So even when I write my papers, I tend to take many hours on the simplest of papers because I fear that my teacher/professor wouldn’t accept it because it’s not written the way it’s supposed to. I like to use casual tones in my essays/papers.

My relationship with writing is honestly very tricky for me. I usually write whenever I have an assignment to do and when given the option of a powerpoint or writing, I will tend to just write an essay in most cases. Otherwise on most days I wouldn’t write unless I have to in order to express my complete thoughts. Thinking about it now, I think I have a love hate relationship with writing. At some points in time I love writing because I can talk for however long I want and use bits of evidence found online to just tie up my entire essay/paper together. Which I do find enjoyable, especially when I gain a glimpse of inspiration on what to write about. So because of this need for inspiration, what I’ll do is focus on other assignments in the mean time and think about the paper I need to write throughout my day just thinking about how to write and organize it. However the days that I absolutely just detest and loathe writing is when I’m being rushed. I have way too many ideas in my head on how to write this essay that I usually don’t know where to even begin. Then when I do begin I tend to cross everything out and restart because I didn’t like it enough to keep it. This habit sticks with me in any situation, even in large exams and whatnot. I remember writing an essay during my AP exam and I crossed out nearly two pages of writing because I didn’t like the tone I used.