Author: Ethan Sherpa

Unit 2 Reflection

I definitely feel that researching and finding credible sources is something new I learned in this unit that I didn’t know before. Before I would usually use wikipedia or some random website and would consider their information to be correct or reliable but now I realized that people’s work isn’t always correct. Checking out the ccny archives was a pretty cool experience (I think that’s the name of it, it was on the fifth floor). I wasn’t able to go with the class but I was able to check it out by myself when I was at campus the other day. At first, I had a vague understanding of rhetoric and as I went through this unit, I’ve been able to have a deeper understanding of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies. 

I was proud that I was able to write enough for this topic and I didn’t really write this in a standard essay type paper. For this paper, I organized my paper in 4 categories, rhetorical situation, rhetorical triangle, rhetorical strategy and effective or not effective. With this, it was easier for me to think of a way to write or get my creative juices flowing. If I were to revise the writing I did for this unit, I would’ve definitely chosen a different topic to write about as the animal rights movement was surprisingly a topic I didn’t have fun researching about.

For this unit, I would say I didn’t really participate or engage as much as I normally would due to me being injured so I was unable to attend class. However, the days I do manage to arrive at school, I’d say I participate a decent amount of times. Besides the engagement aspect of this unit, I would say that using the class notes and readings definitely did help out especially when writing a rhetorical analysis on this topic. With these notes, I found it easier to find out what type of rhetorical devices and strategies were possibly used by the speaker.

Compared to unit 1, unit 2 has given me an opportunity to write a paper in a different way, such as writing the paper in categories. I would list out the categories and then give explanations of them. I feel like the information and resources I have right now is enough for me to complete this unit. I don’t think there’s anything I would want you to change going forward.

Unit 1 Reflection

Throughout the “This I No Longer Believe” paper, I was able to learn how to write about myself. Before coming to college, especially in high school, we usually never practiced writing about ourselves but instead just analysis of books that we read and what were the author’s intentions or what rhetorical tools were seen to enhance the story or lesson learned. From this paper, it was a fun experience writing about myself as I found it refreshing to not write about someone else. I believe the last time I wrote about myself was back in elementary school so writing this paper helped me understand now what I should and can be writing to be considered as “college level”. 

I don’t believe I have a lot of questions after writing this paper but I think one question would be what could I do to improve on my introduction and conclusion paragraphs. However, some strengths I saw when writing this paper would be that I was able to have a structured paper from introduction to conclusion and I was able to write about myself. To be honest, when I first heard of this assignment, I thought I would have a difficult time writing about myself because it’s been a long time since I did but it turns out I didn’t have to worry about it. If I were to revise the writing I did for this unit, I would probably want to improve on my conclusion because I felt that the discovery of my parents being the tooth fairy wasn’t enough but I wanted to put what happened after or what my parents tried to say to cover up this incident to get me to still believe but I felt like I would be writing too much if I did.

Looking back, my rate of participation/engagement in this unit wasn’t that good. Sure I participated a bit when we were discussing ways or places that help us focus when doing work but I didn’t really participate when we started discussing the tools we can use to write this paper. Even though I didn’t engage as much, I was still able to obtain useful information or tips on what I can do to make my paper better or how I could give a better peer review response. After that, I then organized my thoughts about my topic, the tooth fairy and then structured them into paragraphs that I can plan on writing. This helped me be successful in writing this paper because each paragraph had a clear goal in mind that I made to make sure I was writing the right information about that event.

I don’t think you should change anything in the structure of our course because currently, I feel like it’s fine as of now because I was able to get useful information on what I could do when planning this paper and how I could write this type of paper. I think reading the example papers were definitely my favorite because these examples helped me decide on how I would write this paper and how I could write about myself. Besides that, I don’t think there’s anything else to say about this reflection.

Yourself as Reader, Writer, and Researcher

I was never a huge fan of reading books until I stumbled across mangas, webtoons and webtoon novels. If you didn’t know, mangas are basically Japanese comic books and webtoons are Korean comic books. I was introduced to these types of books from close friends back in high school and still to this point, I enjoy reading mangas and webtoons. With the arrival of the pandemic and the quarantine, I started to frequently read these books almost every day. Besides reading manga, webtoons and webtoon novels, I kind of enjoyed reading comic books because I can see pictures of what’s currently happening throughout the story. What I dislike reading would be history related books. I feel like reading books about the past makes me unmotivated to read these types of books because I am not really interested in the past. There weren’t that many good memories when reading books but a bad one was when I had to read out to the entire class in third grade. During that time, I had social anxiety so when I had to read out loud to thirty other students in the class, I just froze. As of now, my anxiety isn’t as bad, but I’m still trying to overcome this anxiety.

Compared to reading, writing wasn’t really as fun. At a very young age when I first started to learn how to write and then eventually write essays, I never enjoyed writing. When I would have to write essays for my school, my mind would always wander somewhere else. However, recently I started to write a daily journal of what happens throughout the day. Sometimes after writing these daily journals, I would like to reminisce on days where I had fun so I would go to that specific day in my journal. Back in high school, I would always have to write no matter what I was doing. Everytime I finished a chapter of a book, I would have to write a summary of the main points and what happened in that chapter. As I kept repeating this process for every chapter and every book, I started to heavily dislike writing. 

I haven’t frequently researched for information, but the last time I did do a research, it was about how covid impact the working field. I had to write a paper about how this pandemic impacted how and where people with office jobs would have to work. When I first started researching, I thought the main problem would be finding information that is trustworthy but the actual problem with researching this was that I didn’t really know that many places to obtain information regarding my topic. However after a bit of struggling, I was able to find multiple sources for my paper.

Starting this class, I feel sorta prepared as to passing this class because I really don’t want to repeat this course. From this class, I am hoping to improve in my writings because I’ve always considered myself to be lacking when it comes to this.