Arturo Salazar

Reflection Paper
What concept and/or reading did you find most interesting/helpful? Why?
At the beginning of the semester we were assigned a paper on
discourse communities, when first told about it, I was confused on what
exactly a discourse community was. After reading the assigned reading, The
Concept of Discourse Community by John Swales, I got a better
understanding on what a discourse community was about. I found the
concept of what makes up a discourse community interesting and quite
useful, in a way, it helped me to group people together and understand what
it is that makes one group different to another. I am not saying that I will use
what I have learned regarding discourse communities to label people, I will
however, use it to distinguish their personalities and get a better
understanding on what type of person they are.
What assignment did you feel helped your writing or helped you gain insight
the most? Which didnt? Why?
The rhetorical analysis assignment from week six is the assignment
that helped me become a better writer. Learning about the three rhetorical
appeals, ethos, logos, and pathos, allowed me to take into consideration
what my reader(s) is thinking as he or she reads my paper. Thanks to my
1301 RWS professor, I can use these three appeals to make my paper more
interesting and possibly control how the reader feels through my use of
pathos. Along with how the reader feels, I can also assure them of the
credibility of the information (logos) presented in my paper by making use of
ethos.
Similar to the rhetorical analysis paper, the public service
announcement project we had to present in week fifteen, also dealt with the
three rhetorical appeals, which is why it helped me out the least. On
comparison to the rhetorical analysis paper in which we looked at an online
article to find these appeals, the PSA project asked us to implement these
appeals in our own video to make the viewer feel how we want them to feel
and to understand what is it we are trying to inform them about. The reason I
found it less useful and unnecessary is that we had already been assigned
work centered around the topic of rhetorical appeals. I personally dont like
learning about or working on the same thing twice that is school-related so
this last assignment was not something I was motivated on doing.
What is your definition of rhetoric?
As defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, rhetoric is the art of
speaking or writing effectively.(Merriam-Webster dictionary, 2016) What this
definition means to me is being able to use ones words and writing as a way
to convey your message with enough persuasion to let the reader, or viewer
consider whatever it you are trying to talk about. And I believe that this is

Arturo Salazar

what we have learned and what we have been working on throughout the
semester. Using the communication model as reference, by analyzing the
receiver we as senders can manipulate certain aspects of the message to
really captivate the receiver and control how he or she responds.