To Ben Jorgenson,

This class has taught me a lot about many various parts of writing, I didn’t expect to
learn what I did, but it has helped a lot more than what I believed it would.
Rhetoric was my favorite to learn about by far, using it to evaluate discussions and my
own writing was an extremely valuable skill to have. The ability to distinguish between Ethos,
Pathos, and Logos, feels a bit dated to me, but at the same time using that along with how all of
them apply to how we think was very entertaining to me. Using a combination of ethos and
pathos seems to be the most prevalent method in politics, meanwhile in person to person
conversations logos is much more prevalent.
With the use of action, it was great to see how people combined many different passions
of theirs with their viewpoint synthesizes to create genuine solutions to real problems that affect
us. The ACtion used by the paper made about stopping fishing directly reflects what this about,
and although the paper didn’t talk about the problems enough, the entire one was about
solutions to the problem, which I really respect.
Evaluating how we used choices to display our opinions was very interesting throughout
the course. Every format has many different methods of deciding how to display information.
Twitter is an app based on little thought, yet it displays many conversations which are about
advanced topics, meanwhile writing a college paper on what you should eat for dinner is
overkilling it to say the least.
Context in an English class is very interesting, it seems that free speech has always
been very prevalent in-class conversations. Figuring out why the authors of the stories I was
learning about was very powerful in determining the choices they made in how to speak.
Learning the best writing practices was nice in many ways in the sense that it toned
down anxiety in relation to writing. Using the method of throwing all words down and then
revising later with further thought was an amazing thing to learn. That applies to many facets of
life and abides by the idea that perfection is pointless and detrimental to achieving in any way.
Resources are valuable to understand in many ways. The way you speak is important to
evaluate because learning and getting better at that is one of the main ways to actually get a
point across. The idea of how resources are used was honestly the most confusing one, I don’t
necessarily think it applies to how it’s been used. That could be because I don’t understand it,
but it feels almost like a combination of many of the other big ideas that don’t distinguish itself
enough to be its own Big Idea, along with not necessarily applying to the title.
It was very interesting learning about how all of these apply to writing and I do feel as if
all of these have greatly improved my writing and more importantly, how I think about it.