Vitter 1 Peyton Vitter Dr.

Dietel-Mclaughlin WR 13300 7 December 2011 Reflection of Writing Over the semester of the class, we were introduced to new types of media for writing essays. Essays encompassed audio, video, images, and, of course, standard text. Through my progression of each essay, I grow in my abilities to master each writing style. In my first blog entry, I note how writing, in particular, is ones of my worst attributes. I also include the lack of originality with sources in my writing, especially using Wikipedia. However, through the work of each assignment, I have adapted to using more credible sources and implementing the evidence to support my topics in a better fashion. Although the process was rather lengthy, I developed my writing throughout the course of this semester into a process of its own. Not only did I have a writing process within each assignment but I also had the long term writing process that allowed me to produce a visual essay with supporting videos, images, and text. In the first assignment, I had only my experiences to support my narrative; however, now with the availability of sources and tools to implement them, I have reached out to more than I have ever held with confidence and purpose. Through my blog posts, my portfolio reveals my progression of understanding of rhetoric. From one of the earliest blog posts about Multimedia Literacy to my visual essay on cell phones, the transformation of rhetoric has been astonishing. I began to understand rhetoric after I received my rhetorical analysis paper back and met with Dr. E. By looking over my entire paper and pointing out what parts of my paper were good uses of rhetoric and others not, I

Vitter 2 developed a clearer picture of how to use rhetoric properly. Without this encounter, my grade for this course would not be the same and my understanding of the entire course would be askew. My rhetoric within my revised rhetorical analysis is some of my best use of rhetoric. The blogs have been a good tool to look back on and admire how much my writing has progressed, especially in my development of critical reading and summarizing. In the middle of the term, I wrote a blog report on summarizing an article from Suler on avatars. This blog represents my first attempt of critical reading and thinking. However, as the term progressed so did my critical research. The amount of articles that I used in my researched argument was far too great to not demonstrate skill in critical reading. By indicating the main points of each article and relating them into my researched argument, I prove my critical research and reading skills to have progressed significantly from the beginning of the year. Without this practice of enhancing my critical writing skills, incorporating massive amounts of sources into my researched argument would have been nearly impossible; and the writing itself within each assignment would not be as sound because I would have no idea how to write anything beyond scattered bits of information. Thanks to the nature of this course, modernizing writing with newer types of media, I have more easily come to understand critical reading, researching, and writing. Multimedia has played an enormous role in my development of reading, writing, and rhetoric in this course. Because I have been stuck with text my entire life, often the message portrayed is not very well conveyed to me. However, the newer types of media have opened the door for my understanding and thrown me into a mass of rhetoric and writing that I can easily digest. Each of the assignments had its own particular goal in developing part of our writing, reading, rhetoric, and research in this course. The audio narrative allowed us to begin to write more freely in a conversational style to springboard us onto greater works. It also made us think

Vitter 3 about the rhetoric used in our voices. I developed a better sense from the start of how to use rhetoric to produce a captivating narrative. The rhetorical analysis built upon that foundation. With a normal style essay in text and six to eight pages to sculpt my rhetorical masterpiece, I was able to take what I had learned from the narrative essay and enhance my rhetorical skills with text, especially after revising it with the guidance of Dr. E. The rhetorical analysis helped transition my understanding of rhetoric from audio to text, preparing me for a larger task: the researched argument. The researched argument needed healthy rhetoric and research. By incorporating the many articles that I researched with the rhetoric I developed through the first two assignments, I produced my researched argument in a fitting fashion, illustrating my understanding of all the aspects of the paper. The visual essay allowed me to incorporate my creative writing that I had used in my audio narrative, my rhetoric that I honed in my rhetorical analysis, my researching skills that I used so often in my researched argument, and my choice of presenting the topic in an exciting multimedia. My prezi allowed me to demonstrate all aspects of this course into a single presentation. I am most proud of my rhetorical analysis because it provided the stepping-stone to all the other assignments following. My rhetorical analysis demonstrates how I have progressed in understanding rhetoric and highlights my hard work that went into writing it and substantial revisions that indicate my mastery of rhetoric. I have always had a difficult time understanding rhetoric and to finally be able to grasp the heart of it gives me confidence as a writer.