Unit 1 “ This I No Longer Believe” Essay statement:

In this essay, I used many rhetorical devices I learned in class to complete the objective of displaying detail and emotion and demonstrating how and why one of my core beliefs changed at some point in my life. At first, I used imagery to describe my initial sorrow, and went on to use witty metaphors and used a climax arc to make my story as well-structured as possible. I also made great use of a hook, in the beginning, to keep the reader interested in continuing through the essay. Then when writing the further parts in which I elaborated on my epiphany I made sure to use more figurative language to make the comparisons that logically connected me to make the switch in my belief from being hopeless that my future could change to being sure that  I had a chance at greatness. Secondly, in class, I collaborated with class members to help improve each other’s essays, received constructive criticism about my essay, and gave it back. This accomplished the learning objectives of using rhetorical devices we learned about as well as of collaborating over the writing process and revising as such.

 

Unit 2 Rhetorical Device Essay: 

For this essay, we had been simultaneously learning about numerous rhetorical devices as well as all the different methods that could be described as rhetoric. Primarily, we focused on social movements across America, especially in American colleges and universities. Outrageous methods of rhetoric even included the burning down of ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) offices in colleges across America in response to the Vietnam war. For my specific essay, I focused on the Civil Rights movement, for the rhetorical example from that movement that I focused on was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in which he uses beautiful examples of parallelism and metaphors to appeal to the American people’s pathos. I went into detail about how this example of rhetoric stands unmatched in achieving this cause. Then I talked about a political cartoon in which the author tries to instigate a feeling of shame in those who did not participate in riots after contemporary police brutality. This evidence showed a clear attempt at the rhetoric that I had learned to identify and describe. I also learned to cite my sources for this paper and made sure to do this for the MLK speech and the political cartoon and author.

 

Unit 3 Inquiry Question Essay: 

This being the longest and final essay required a sum of all of what we had learned all semester and included the completion of the largest amount of course learning objectives of all of them. In this essay, I inquired about the origins, immediate effects/intentions, and long-term economic effects of modern-day Islamic terrorism and the war on terror. In this essay, we had the requirements of clear formatting and structuring our essay to a specific academic style, using rhetorical devices from the new ones we had learned, making and supporting our arguments with evidence that is properly cited, and finally repeatedly participating in the group critic and revision process. I did as accurately as possible to my knowledge using Procatalepsis, parallelism, antithesis, and more. I also included a citation page that was according to all the evidence I used and it included the precise links titles and dates on which those sources were cited.

 

Rhetorical Device Assignment: 

This assignment is precisely lined with our rhetorical device course learning objective and summed up the main part of our learning in this class, it was to deeply focus on all the ways that writers can convey their ideas in writing. Here the devices were Procatalepsis and Distinctio, both of which I made quite good use of within my papers for this class. Procatalepsis is to give an opposing argument and then answer it, and distintio is to further specify something that you speak about in the pursuit of making a point.