English 2150 Blog

Throughout my school life I had a good amount of times where I procrastinated. My freshman year of college I procrastinated on an essay and this was an experience that really kind of woke me up that college and high school is much different. I had a 10 page project due and I waited till the last 2 days to complete it. I thought since I had brainstormed ideas and made a plan for my essay that it would be a breeze to write it. So when I started to write my essay and I followed my plan my essay only ended up being 4 pages. I hadn’t even completed half the work and it was due the next day. I was pretty much working on that essay the whole day and just elaborating on my ideas and not repeating was a difficult task for me .

Academic writing is a type of writing that refers to expository and argumentative prose that is used mainly by university students, faculty, and researchers to convey information about a certain subject. Academic writing is usually precise and straightforward. Academic writing is personal because there is a small audience and you are writing this work specifically for the professor or your own classmates.  As an academic writer throughout my years in college and grade school, I wouldn’t say I was bad, but it wasn’t something I liked to do. Certain topics would interest me but personally I prefer to write on a topic I choose to write an academic paper. In my Freshman year of college, I was given a project to write on whether Lucy could be a human ancestor? The topic itself was really interesting but the professor had restrictions, like the project has to be a minimum of ten pages, or or we have to find information from certain resources, and the way the essay was structured was also very crucial to the grade we received. What I mean by that is certain information had to be in paragraphs and they had to be in a certain order.  All of a sudden an interesting essay which I wanted to learn more about, became something I was forcing myself to do. Writing and academic writing are probably two of my least favorite things to do but in terms of being successful as an academic writer, I would say I am pretty good just based on grades and feedbacks from old teacher and professors. Academic writing, I believe takes a lot of obedience because there are usually restrictions or formats we must follow in order for the essay to even be graded and graded well. In the article Why is Academic Writing So Academic by Joshua Rothman he explains the difference between other types of writing and academic writing. He writes, “Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience.” I agree with this statement because as I’ve pointed out before academic writing is a test of obedience and following directions kind of like a mission. Whereas when I am writing for fun on social media, texting, or even writing about a topic I enjoy and want to write on I don’t think of it as something I have to do but rather something want to do. Another piece of academic writing that I’ve also done in college is an informative essay on how Chinese Americans have become a model minority in the United States. For this essay it was strictly data and factual information from college databases. We weren’t supposed to give any opinions on this topic because my thesis was being backed by reasoning. Again I did well on this piece of writing in terms of grading because all directions were followed the essay was very straightforward. Writing academic essay with a class and getting them looked over by other classmates and the professor also improved my writing because they noticed revisions that would make the essay better for the final version. For this particular essay I used some of the parts from the Toulmin method and also Logos to give my reader information on this topic.

In conclusion, academic writing is used mainly for research and university writing purposes. It is very straight forward and to me it tests obedience in following directions. As an academic writer myself I strongly believe the things Joshua Rothman said about the differences that academic writing and writing for fun is. I also believe I am a good academic writer even though writing is my least favorite thing to do in school. Some of my experiences with academic writing is that I believe I do better when I write drafts so that I can receive feedback from not only the professor but also my other classmates. I believe drafts are very important to the academic writing process because it allows you to see edits and revisions you normally wouldn’t see.

Ethos – appealing to ethics and convincing based on character and credibility.

Pathos – appealing to the emotions and convincing an audience based on emotional response.

Logos – appealing based on logic, and using reasoning to backup a claim.

Ethos example: Lebron James advertising himself to sell his new Nike sneakers, showing these sneakers will help you be a great basketball player.

Reason: Lebron James is a famous basketball player, so he has credibility when it comes to basketball gear.

Pathos example: A Six Flags commercial where they show people are thrilled and excited to ride their roller coasters.

Reason: In this commercial if you see people are excited and thrilled to be at this amusement park it will make you believe that you will also be excited when you go to Six Flags.

Logos example: An article that states global warming is a big issue we are facing right now, and their is scientific data to support the claim.

Reason: The claim is that global warming is a big issue that we are facing in today’s world, and some of the facts would be ice melting in the hemispheres and some of the natural disasters were are facing based on high temperatures and abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

For logos, pathos, and ethos, deciding which one to use is based on your audience. For example the Lebron James sneakers, if you want to appeal to teens and children you can use Lebron as credibility, but there may be some adults that want reasoning behind what makes this sneaker better than others, you can use logos, and talk about some of the material that is used on the sneaker, and how it helps you play better on the court.

In my freshman year of college i did a research essay on how Chinese immigrants became a model minority in the United States and the different ways that they assimilated with American culture and society since their immigration history.

Ethos – In my essay i provided ethos by directly mentioning credible resources. A lot of the statistical data came from the credible resources and also using a formal tone to show my audience that this is an research and informative essay. The essay is also spell checked, which gives the audience the notion that this essay was well done and also checked. I also provided the authors are very highly educated in the topics i discussed so the audience knows that the information is coming from a person a lot of knowledge of the topic.

Pathos – In my essay pathos isn’t really used because it is an informative essay and i am not trying to appeal to anybody’s emotion instead i am using information to persuade my audience to think the way i think. I would say the emotion in my essay is a serious informative tone that appeals to somebody’s that is interested in the topic and wants to learn more about it.

Logos – My essay is mostly logos because i am using statistics to persuade and inform my audience to believe what i am saying. The essay is mostly logical and basically backing up claims with reasoning and data.

Toulmin Method analysis:

Claim: Chinese immigrants are one of the immigrant groups that are part of Americas model minorities.

Reasons: The educational attainment, labor force participation, and income of Chinese Americans are higher than many other immigrant groups in America.

Evidence: 25 percent of Chinese immigrants hold a bachelors degree and 29 percent of them had an advanced degree. Employment rates for white men are about 89 percent and for Chinese men the employment rate is about 88 percent. Not having a college degree only reduces the employment rate for Chinese by 1 percent. The average income for Chinese Americans is $65,050 which is much higher than the national average.

Using both the rhetorical analysis really helped me better understand my work. I noticed that i didn’t use pathos a lot in my essay which maybe i can learn to use in the future. Another thing i could use more of in my essays are ethos and appealing to the audience with more character. Using the Toulmin method gave me a better understanding on the claims and reasons that i used and how they are necessary for writing my informative essay.

Claim: The claim here is that content and form go hand in hand and they are both necessary in whichever way you are trying to convey your message. He doesn’t really state which one is more important or the different circumstances that one could be more important than the other.

Grounds: Here he showed us an example on how kids were given an exercise to perform a translation it was impossible without keeping the same form and content because it can change the whole meaning of the message.

Warrant: For the audience that believe one is more important than the other, Burton points out that they are “ornaments” to a rhetoric that are used to understand the full message and without the ornaments the message is not clear.

Backing: I think he sort of backed his claim with the ornament example, but he also gave an example on why the rhetoricians divided content and form and he states that they are interdependent on one another. One is not important than the other.

Rebuttal: I do not really see any rebuttal in this essay because he basically backed up his claim with numerous examples, and i do not really see a counter claim that can be made in this argument.

Qualifiers: I am pretty sure from this essay he means to write that his claim is always true in any type of message so there is not really a distinguishing factor in this claim.

I think doing a rhetorical analysis on this essay made it harder for me to understand because there are certain things from the Toulmin method that don’t really apply here. I believe this essay uses more of a logos way of persuasion because he uses reasoning to back his claim. I would say that there is not really a counter claim or rebuttal for this specific argument. I believe for all kinds of ways to convey a message this holds true and neither form or content is more important than the other. The Toulmin method is a great way to persuade an audience because you are turning into the person that has a counter to the claim, and it makes you look at your claim from a different point of view.

To me articulate means speaking “fluently” to whoever i am talking to. When i speak to my family my age and to friends i speak in a informal type of slang, which they clearly understand and to us that is how we speak “fluently” to each other. When i speak to elderly people or people who i have not met before i speak to them in a formal tone which is perceived to everybody as fluent English. When i meet somebody from my ethnic background i speak to them in Bengali because that is the way we both can connect and understand each other. There are many different ways to articulate express ourselves. Articulating yourself is important because it tells us a lot about each other and also helps us understand who we are.