Reflection blog for final

I learned from my instructor this semester that ethos couldn’t be projected from one blog or one paper. Rather, it’s what you have projected through out all published and unpublished work. Who you are and where you come from play a big roll in weather the reader will give value to what you say or not. I am not to say whether my writing is credible or not because it is up to you, the reader, to decide. However; I can try to convey where my sources come from to make it easier for the reader to evaluate my credibility. An example of that is these quotes from my technology essay “Miranda Morley is an educator, business consultant and owner of copywriting/social-media Management Company making her knowledgeable in all the areas approached.” Here I introduced the author to save my audience time and effort in determining who exactly she is and why they should value her opinion.

I also learned from writing the Political Ad Campaign that pathos is not the only factor responsible in persuading the audience of your point of view. There are several key factors contributing to the persuasion of the audience such as emotional appeal, clarity of the message and the message’s informative content. For an article to be at its maximum effectiveness at persuading, the article should cover almost all tools of persuasion.

When it comes to my writing, I actually thought I was reasonably good until I took this class. I think it is mostly because I took the previous class “ENGL 1113” with other international students just like me. So the average level was not as high as it is in this class, which makes sense, since all my classmates are native English speakers.  I feel handicapped when doing assignments because I somewhat lack the tools that a lot of my fellow classmates have mastered. My biggest struggle when writing a paper is finding the write words to start my paragraph with. I find myself staring at the screen for a while without writing anything or writing something that my sound off topic as my instructor commented more than once. Plus I feel that I lack analyzing and elaborating skills mainly because of my limited vocabulary. I still try doing my best and feel that my speaking and writing have improved quit a bit this semester. My persuasion skills improved by learning how to put a stronger thesis as the instructor stated on his comments on my last essay. My use of pronouns has also gotten better as opposed to the beginning of the semester when I used to miss use them all the time.

Our last website assignment wasn’t the easiest one. I’ve always been intimidated by technology as I stated before in my technological identity assignment, but I feel that doing such assignment made me realize that talking about something in the internet isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Persuasion is a big part of one’s everyday life and I feel that this class did a good job in making me better at it.