On this page,
show how you have learned and practiced each of the skills below this semester. Use evidence from your writing projects, argument blogs, or in-class discussions.
- Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating
As my role as writer and reader of this course, I have asked questions, learned what I didn’t know before, thought about new ideas, and communicated my own ideas.
For example, this semester, the writing I have done in our classroom has always had the same audience, but I haven’t always written and read to do the same things. This semester, I have read student papers wondering what expertise they were going to bring, asking questions about the choices you made. I read critically, trying to learn about education, and presidential speeches, and drones, and what any of this stuff has to do with my students. I learned, because they communicated, that presidential speeches might have a lot to do with my students if the speakers are first ladies and the audience is American women. I learned that drones are used in ways I wasn’t aware of and I might need to keep them and the power the president has to use them in the front of my mind.
When I wrote, I wrote in response. Student writing was my exigency, my reason for writing. I had to communicate what impacted me, what met assignment standards, and what was confusing. I participated in free writes with them this semester sometimes to use writing to think, to spark my own ideas for how to approach an assignment in a new way. When we were writing rhetorical analyses, I freewrote on an article on CNN about fashion and war photography when we were thinking about rhetorical analyses. After I wrote, I had a much better idea of how the two connected because I kind of used the words to link all my thoughts together.
The type of readership that CNN has is usually Americans who are interested in political topics. CNN, itself, is largely seen as a left-leaning medium. The author’s claim would need to appeal to that crowd. I think that some of the ways the article does this is by acknowledging that many involved with politics and diplomacy see fashion as a superficial endeavor, not to be talked about in the same sentence as something of monumental importance like war, unless it is with mocking and disdain. The author subverts that expectation though. She acknowledges that fashion may not be as dangerous as a warzone, but the similarities in images between subjects of war and subjects of style should not be discounted. She opens this conversation by letting the photographers speak. There is a lot of use of quotations. This is an ethos-driven move: let those with the experience in both realms do the talking. She also lets the images themselves do a lot of the talking. While she explains the similarities a little, she does not do detail. The data—the images—do that. It is a way of letting the audience make up their own minds about what they see. I think that this creates a good rapport with the audience. We are trusted to the data and our own interpretations matter and suddenly become part of the way we read.
- Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources
- Integrate their own ideas with those of others
- Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power