Reflection Essay 'Redeeming Average Homeboy'

In “Homeboy”, Malcolm X, a prominent leader during the Civil Rights era, discusses discrimination within the black community itself through the use of thoughtful imagery, eloquent diction, and symbolism throughout the essay.

In this chapter, Lunsford details the planning and drafting process for a writer to organize their ideas with either a formal outline or a rough plan. Lunsford reminds writers to be flexible during the drafting process and not to think twice about changing elements of the essay at this point in the process. Lunsford goes on to explain the qualities academic paragraphs must have these include unity, development and coherence. To obtain unity within a paragraph all sentences should relate to the topic sentence of the paragraph. When developing a paragraph it is important to switch between general and specific ideas in the paragraph, while supporting those ideas with details, evidence and examples as required. Ensuring a paragraph is coherent is crucial when developing an academic paragraph. Because readers need to be able to follow a writers ideas easily, Lunsford gives her readers a method to follow to achieve this goal. This method includes using the general to specific ideas, repetition, parallel structures, and using transition words. The author notes that this method should also be used to link paragraphs

Everybody has their own methods for writing; however, I believe there is always room for improvement. Chapter 3 in Everyone’s an Author has shown me that writing involves processes that need to be mastered through constant practice. It also revealed helpful tips on how to develop writing processes that can help write effective papers.

On a more serious level, coherence is undermined while being one of the writer's and reader's most basic need. "The problem is not that the Five-Paragraph formula produces incoherence but rather that it limits students to a superficial, predictable level or coherence," (232) states Foley. This allows for students to throw any three liberally related ideas together for the body of the essays. Once students fabricate a thesis statement that elucidates for their three ideas, the students feel they have mastered structure. Foley states, "To be asked merely to enumerate three aspects of any topic relieves the student of the need to probe relationships... it robs them of any motivation to do so," (232). Juxtaposition is not

The topic portion of the rhetorical situation is the subject or main focus of the paper. The next item would be the angle which is viewpoint concerning the topic. These two pieces make up the starting point for writing a paper. Also important would be the purpose or reason for writing as well as the readers, group of focus who will find use or interest in the paper. It is important to choose all of these items carefully. By mapping out this before starting my paper it has helped me organize my initial thoughts which

Nunnally states its purpose to “provide[s] for effective inculcation of concepts such as unity, coherence, and development (Nunnally).” The model is structured to unite each paragraph to each other by using a thesis statement paragraph, three supporting paragraphs for said idea and finally, to summarize your essay. The use of transitional words allows the author to smoothly connect each paragraph and idea. Finally, the model develops chronologically. The author will introduce, prove and conclude. The five-paragraph model fulfills its purpose for the inexperienced writers

The Rhetorical triangle is a typical reference to the three logical interests recognized by Aristotle which consist of ethos, pathos, and logos. In the Rhetorical Triangle is formed by three sections: Speaker, Audience, and Context. For the Speaker element, you have to ensure that the audience knows your motive in your writing. In the audience element, it is essential that you know who are audience is to avoid mistakes in communication. Finally in the context or message element, you need to address the following questions “How was your information delivered?” and “What types of arguments did I use?” To be successful in your writing you must incorporate all three elements from the Rhetorical Triangle into your paper.

Analyzing was never my strong suit, until we were assigned to write a rhetorical analysis. The assignment was to look at a persuasive article whether in magazines or online, and analyze how/why the author’s article was effective. With the explanation on how to properly analyze, I was able to write an effective rhetorical analysis paper. Not only did I write a strong rhetorical analysis, but I now have the knowledge on how to effectively write an analysis, which will benefit me in the future. Learning how to take a text and analyze it, helped guide me towards goal #3, which better my process of writing and thinking.

Using couple quotes from our reading added about one paragraph to our essay, but all the quotes were stuck in one paragraph instead of having them all scattered throughout our writing. That was not the only problem with the quotes, we didn’t explain the quotes after we wrote them. One good quote we used talks

Some elements of writing (development, organization, style) fit task, purpose and/or audience; others are mismatched.

In this course we’ve learned to how to effectively analyze rhetorical situations. We start off by identifying the audience. The audience is the intended or unintended recipients of the rhetorical message. Identifying the audience is important because it will determine the style and language you will use in your writing. For example, if an undergraduate student is writing to their professor the style and language of the writing will be formal. Whereas if the audience is the undergraduate’s peers, then the language can be informal and have a more relaxed tone. Then we explore the context of the rhetorical situation. The context is what helps you interpret meaning in a situation by giving information on what the piece is about. By understanding

This is because as writers, most of us become frighten to what our readers will think of “this” and “that”. With this constant way of thinking our writing will never improve because we won’t be interested in the actual story being implemented, instead we will substitute that attention towards the thoughts of our readers. Just like King claimed, “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need of define some sort of writing as “good” and other sorts as “bad’, is fearful behavior” (King, 128). This argumentative analogy demonstrates how constant fear becomes the dilemma between a reader’s decision to continuously keep reading or to put the book back on the shelf. Constant fear in any writer’s report, becomes the cause of having the need to go to thesaurus to change their vocabulary, yet having no idea if the “substituted” word works. This becomes useful in realizing that one must be able to write without that constant deliberation of questioning ourselves as writers. Perspicuously, another tip that would be useful is having the proper organization/style. Every writer without counting if they are authors or not, are prone to having a style, some sort of organization that defines them. However, to many unassertive eyes’, difficultness appears when knowing the length of your paragraphs. With knowing the length of your paragraphs, it all comes down to one simple portion of this whole writing process? A simple portion that consists of the topic. If you are writing an expository prose, you shall know that the paragraphs will be a bit longer than the rest. Expository proses, whom are continuous paragraphs that “contains a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify the first” (King, 130). Nonetheless, you would never find an expository writing piece with two sentences per paragraph; however, what about fictional stories? Within

As I look at my Rhetorical Analysis essay and back at my revised Narrative essay, I see three main areas that I would enjoy improving in. First, I would love to improve in the ability to attract a wider audience. Whether it be through my

The structure is a easier more comprehensible and universal building block for writing fundamentals. The method consists of basic parts being an introduction, body and conclusion; an easy idea to grasp when learning to write. The “Footstool” method is arguably a “good” writing method especially following a specific set of instructions. Through my high school years we were taught the rhetorical triangle as a way to further our writing. The purpose of learning rhetoric was to rejecting the idea of a format rather focusing on persuasion of a thought and the our purpose of the writing. The rhetorical triangle could be broken down to emotions, message, and ethics. The method focused on an appeal to these parts of

Although my writing has made some good progress during the course of this semester, I still some things I need to learn in order to keep improving my writing. Grammar, writing in an active voice, and building my rewrite skills are three examples of skills I need to build upon to continue to improve me writing.