I believe my strongest essay was the ethnography. Accumulatively I spent the most time on that piece, and I think I did a good job meshing the criteria of the assignment with my personal voice. Despite the ethnography being my best essay, I enjoyed writing the Create Your Own sequence the most. It was gratifying because it allowed me to write on a topic that was important and interesting to me. From English 111 I have learned the importance of logos, pathos, and ethos within writing. Also I have realized the importance of knowing who your audience is and how targeting this audience makes your writing much more effective.
The essay I chose to revise was my rhetorical analysis. For me, this essay was the most difficult to compose, and after re-reading my final draft I found many areas that I could improve upon. I attained more research that supported my thesis and edited/deleted the writing that wasn’t compatible with my thesis. I am now much more satisfied with this version of my essay for there is much more emphasis on my hypothesis that allows the piece to be more informative.
I am a psychology major and plan on moving on to get my PhD in order to do research on mental illness. I have hopes of someday being a published author of books that help family and loved ones of the mentally ill to understand mental diseases. I think the ethnography will help me in my career path because it showed me how to collect information and form that data into a concise essay that was both enlightening and interesting to read. The rhetorical analysis will help me further because it taught me the significance of audience which will help me in my future writings. The Create Your Own piece showed me how to create an idea that was entirely my own and form a complete story out of it. This was the first taste of actually creating a piece of writing that was entirely self-led, and therefore it gave me an idea of what writing my own book would be like.
Taylor Davis 