Dominic Garrity ENC 1102 Prof.

Rios

Going into this class, I didnt feel too worried. I thought I had English Composition down, I could write an essay for a prompt no problem. However, I was shocked to find myself challenged, especially on this final portfolio. I had been introduced me to a different perspective of English I was not aware of before. Hopefully the work I have done and material I have learned amounts to an A. Picking a question was tough. Usually Im given a topic or work of literature to dissect, but asking the question then researching it was definitely a change up. It took a very long time to come up with a decent question. The question could not be too broad, like asking What do students eat?, or too narrow, like Male strawberry consumption in Rhode Island. It took time to dial in on a question that I was interested in researching and encompassed the necessary spectrum. I settled on How do peers influence students food selections?. The fieldwork for this project was enjoyable. I created a survey to get peoples diet habits and watched people eat. The rest involved analysing and interpreting space, which I was able to better do thanks to previous assignments. The assignments prior to this final project were different, and different threw me off. Speech had taught me that rhetoric was an art of persuasion. However, scholars, such as Vatz, Bitzer and Ed Bauer, asserted and were able to provide details to show otherwise. Vatz claimed that Rhetoric was limited, but Ed Bauer claimed that it was a space/environment that grew. This taught me definitions can be broader than at first perceived, so long as you back it up. Backing up my facts was an issue for me. Not necessarily finding the sources, though OneSource is a new and good tool for finding academic sources, but extrapolating the data and including it in my writing. Data needed to be categorized, which is what the first assignment about logos,

pathos, and ethos helped with. I knew what they were, the definitions that is, but logos, pathos, and ethos make up every bit of writing, like building blocks. They helped me examine the architecture of writing, which came in handy while reading the more difficult to interpret works such as Chavez Leyvas essay. Also, I frequent the UCF gym at least 4 times a week, and never fully gathered all that was in it and dealt with it until writing about it for my Rhetoric essay. I included Reynolds points out that Metaphor and material are often divided to make it easier to distinguish them, but their interaction and combination creates social place. When relating this to the gym, the gym is a place where people go to move objects around and run in place, but this only makes sense when you bridge it with the concept that it aids fitness. Implementing these ideas for my portfolio was a challenge. I feel like I had just learned a new way to think, and then had to try out this new thought process right away. Hopefully my portfolio is of the ever so desirable caliber of an A, because I have learned a lot. Unfortunately, a tougher schedule has taken time I wish I could have put into my English Composition class. I hope I get an A, but I think I have a B on my hands.