1). The dialogue method

The dialogue method is an imaginary conversation having with someone in which you are trying to make a point.

When we first learnt about dialogue method in the class (what’s your point), I thought this method is going to help me throughout any piece of writing, structuring my paper. (I don’t get it) Last semester was the first writing class I had in English. While doing the assignment on that class, I struggled when structuring my essay, I couldn’t follow the rhythm of my essay, it would take me long time to finish. (prove it) However, now with this method I know my way, I follow my rhythm and I know what comes next. (so what) Dialogue method it helped me improve the paragraphs of my writings.

Even now when describing this method, I use dialogue method to discuss and explain why this is so important for me as a writer. It helped me during the third project when talking about literacy, how literacy affects illiterate people, the importance and benefits of literacy and why we need to help them overcome illiteracy.

2). Pathos

Pathos represents an appeal to the emotions of the audience. Pathos along ethos and logos is one of the best forms to use when trying to persuade the audience. During my academic writings last semester, I figured I’d used ethos and logos but not pathos. The lack of pathos (it) did not help me deliver the best of the essay “white privilege” last semester as mentioned in my blog post (#2 Literacy narrative). It was a research we had to do, if the white privilege exists or not. I did not use pathos or emotion to get my point across as the statistical facts were overwhelming. I felt emotion was best achieved by pointing to all the empirical evidence.

Since learning about pathos and the importance of using pathos to persuade audience, emotional influence it was suitable using in the project 3, being said that persuading audience was one key points I had to focus. I used pathos on the project 3 when trying to persuade my audience and also convince American Literacy Council to run my ad with the example of a woman being illiterate and how that affected her life, “My health is poor now, but I really believe that’s because I never went to the doctor and had my physicals and stuff that I should have had”. Pathos are going to help me as a writer to persuade a particular audience, because an emotionally stimulated audience is more likely to accept my claims and act on my requests.

3). Methodology

As we learnt methodology describes the procedures used to identify, select, and analyze information gathered for the purpose of understanding a research problem, allowing the reader to evaluate critically the study’s overall validity and reliability.
Reason why I find methodology important because it reveals the path we have to go through in the social science research. Sometimes academic writing has to do with a social science research and thus we should know to include the elements throughout that research.
On the project 2, (Code-switching, social science report) we used methodology. Part of project was collecting data of two different days on the language we use, the way we use it, and the time spend using each one. I collected data of those two days, by creating groups, amount spent with each group and how I felt while talking to individual group. I created graphs showing the results of the research. This is part of the first question of methodology how does it, what it does? (how was data collected, how was it analyzed).

“First group of data was on my family, I collected 1.5 of data. I noticed that while speaking with them, I felt relaxed, comfortable and emotional. Second group I focused on were my classmates. I was only able to talk with them during class or briefly after class which was about 2.5 hours within the two days of data collection. I felt reserved, yet I spoke informally”. Therefore, this explains how I used methodology and following the other directions. It’s always on past tense, in logical order because it’s telling a narrative. Using first person-pronouns (we and I).