I felt that I learned a lot about social movements and the impact they left. However, it wasn’t like a history lesson but rather more about how different movements used different rhetorics to support their argument further. I already knew about a majority of these social movements (like the civil rights movement and those against the Vietnam war in the 70s). but I think I now understand the intent of these specific leaders. But I also appreciated the fact that we didn’t focus on just the famous figures who are the face of the movement, but also the everyday people who were the bulk of the movement. One example, I’m thinking of is the Black Panthers of CCNY. I believe the strength that I found in my writing is that I’m finding that my delivery is improving. I mean that if an assignment requires a certain presentation of the information I’m supposed to write (ex. formal, informal, inform, convince, etc.), I have a better understanding of the best way to do it. If I were to revise the writing, I think I would find more credible sources. I’m not sure if all of my sources are the most appropriate for this type of assignment. The reason why I say this is because it was hard to track down the origins of some of the protest captions. I would describe my engagement as less than average as I was more focused on working than my classes at the time. I think what helped me remain somewhat successful in this unit is that I was still pretty interested in the topics we had for this unit. I believe this unit is better than the previous one simply because it didn’t force me to delve into my personal life as much. I think more time to do active research in class (if we were able to go to the library for our class) would’ve been perfect. I believe in the future if I’m presented with an argument regarding any social movement, I would try to notice the form of rhetoric they’re trying to utilize.

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.