Blog #4

I have learned many different things from this class throughout the semester. I think the most important thing that I have learned from this class that I will take away from it and to most of my other classes in the future is that I am not a good writer when it comes to the first draft. I cannot just write one draft of an essay and think it is good. This class has definitely given me the skills to be able to reread my shitty first draft and make the required changes to it in one or two more drafts to go from a shitty first draft to an acceptable final draft. I think that I have also learned a lot about rhetoric as well. Coming into this class I thought that rhetoric was only something that you used in your writing to make it sound or look better, I didn’t realize that there was rhetoric in almost everything. Because of this class, I now understand that rhetoric is more than just a style of writing, but it is something we use every day. Restaurant use it to advertise new food on their menus, businesses use it to advertise a product they are trying to sell, college kids use it when they are asking their parents for more money. Rhetoric is everywhere. I have also learned that there are different styles that you use within your rhetoric, different modes, different genres, different audiences you are trying to capture the attention of. Different people will use different modes and genres through rhetoric to present their ideas based on what they are trying to accomplish and who they are trying to present them too. For example, if a fast food burger restaurant was advertising a new kind of burger, they would most likely use a commercial on TV, they would probably choose colors that represented that fast food restaurant. They would most likely show happy customers that are eating the burger so that potential customers that are watching this commercial will associate this burger with happiness. I feel like I’ve learned to most through the genre of the research paper. I think that while I did learn a ton about the history of the Hawaiian surf culture, I learned even more about how to efficiently do research and how to incorporate that research into my writing. This research paper also taught me more about how to conduct an interview and what questions to ask the person I am interviewing.