Core Value 1. My work demonstrates that I used a variety of social and interactive practices that involve recursive stages of exploration, discovery, conceptualization, and development.
College Composition II taught me that the practice of writing is a tool to connect creativity, socialization, and logic. At the beginning of the semester, I was afraid of sharing my papers with others. Now, I know that every comment made regarding to my papers enriched my writing techniques vastly. A perfect example is the transformation of my hypothesis to my final research paper. As the professor Hodges said, one does not have an idea until one engages the process of writing. To develop a strong argument for my research paper, I had to share my ideas during conference, explore academic sources, and review my drafts multiple times. Writing is a complex process that could make you feel frustrated until you have the will to share your ideas with others. In my case, it was helpful to share my thoughts with the professor during the first conference because I gained understanding of how I could manipulate my thesis to create a worthy discussion. This course helped me comprehend that the practice of writing is an art that allows us to share our thoughts with others and turn our points of view into treasures for our evolution as rational beings.
Core Value 2. My work demonstrates that I read critically, and that I placed texts into conversation with one another to create meaning by synthesizing ideas from various discourse communities.
Critical reading allows us to participate in conversations with others and translate our perspective into texts. It is extremely important to pay attention to all the details in papers because writers use specific techniques that they believe are most useful to give both explicit and implicit messages in their writing. The rebuttal argument was a task that allowed me to express my ideas through writing after analyzing the writer’s discussion critically. In this task, I had to learn how to see through my opponent’s eyes in order to give a response to his arguments without misinterpreting his reasoning. The philosophical essence of the article “Why is abortion immoral” made it difficult for me to understand it but after reading it critically multiple times, I was able to accurately interpret the article. In my personal opinion, the rebuttal argument was the task that taught me the most about critical thinking because it required me to critique, analyze, and interpret my opponent’s position in order to respond to his argument in my writing and make my argument more valuable.
Core Value 3. My work demonstrates that I rhetorically analyzed the purpose, audience, and contexts of my own writing and other texts and visual arguments.
As writers, we have to be aware of the purpose, audience, and context of our writing to choose effective writing techniques to accomplish our main objective. When writing the research position essay, my purpose was to convince the audience that restrictive abortion laws should be abolished because they fail to stop abortion rates and lead women to access unsafe abortion, especially low-income women. Because this is a controversial topic that causes emotions on many people, I knew that I had to be careful with my selection of words to avoid making claims that would offend those who disagree with my position. Every time that I composed a paper, I tried to use rhetorical techniques to persuade the audience using logic (logos), emotions (pathos), and ethics and credibility (ethos). In my definition essay, I used logos and pathos when I described restrictive abortion laws as a “social injustice” that is more likely to affect women of low socio-economic status than those who belong to higher socio-economic classes. Also, I used ethos when I provided data to support my thesis.
The visual rhetoric task represents my ability to identify and analyze the purpose, audience, and context of a visual argument. I analyzed multiple scenes of the video to find out the message that the director was trying to convey to the audience. I consider that this task was the most effective because it made me pay attention to every detail of the video and judge its essence.
Core Value 4: My work demonstrates that I have met the expectations of academic writing by locating, evaluating, and incorporating illustrations and evidence to support my own ideas and interpretations.
It is important for writers to incorporate evidence in their writing to make their arguments more credible and persuasive. The causal argument embodies this core value because it was required to examine multiple academic sources to support the argument made in the paper. For this task, I accessed articles from databases of the Campbell library and data provided by international organizations to make sure that the information was legitimate to provide valuable sources to the audience. It is better to provide real data to the audience rather than using fake information to impress the audience. At the beginning of the course, we were told that research was the process to find the truth. At this point of the semester I completely agree with that statement. Research helped me to enrich my knowledge and provided me with strong information to support my thesis.
Core Value 5. My work demonstrates that I respect my ethical responsibility to represent complex ideas fairly and to the sources of my information with appropriate citation.
The practice of writing involves ethical responsibility when it comes to citing sources and accurately representing others’ ideas in our writing. I read multiple academic sources to develop my thesis in my research position essay. My annotated bibliography includes all the academic sources that I read throughout the semester regarding my thesis even if I didn’t include them in the final research position essay. All of the papers written for this course include a reference page and in-text citations. Before incorporating information into my papers, I made sure that I understood the actual essence of the information so that I wouldn’t misinterpret it. When paraphrasing, I gave credit to the authors and shared their positions without altering the meaning of the information.
Counterintuitive 