“Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical.”

Throughout this semester I have done various things that show that I have met and understood this Course Learning outcome. Every now and then, Professor Carr would give my classmates and I example of other students work where we read and answered questions. Those guided reading questions helped us explore the rhetorical elements within that piece of work and determine what genre it was under.

Example: Literacy Narrative Guided Reading Questions

Is this narrative an open form document?

Yes

What is done well?

I believe the way the author captured the reader’s attention was done very well. When she starts the story, she gives the reader a background to her life, which helps the person reading understand why she loves to read so much. She is very clear on why she loves to read and what she hopes will happen as her kids grow up.

What could be revised?

I believe the author is very engaging, but she should go back and check for grammar. Also, some of the sentences were repetitive, even though they were worded differently.

What do you think of the speaker? Discuss the speaker based on the identifying characteristics they provide in the narrative?

I believe that the speaker is a very hard-working woman capable of doing whatever she puts her mind to. She learned to speak another language because of the determination she had.

What is the purpose of this narrative?

I believe the speaker wrote this to highlight how reading can influence a person to do things they might think they aren’t capable of. She wanted people to know how learning to read and write has opened doors for her and helped her to do things so she could better her life.

Who is the audience?

The audience are the people reading the story. Her target audience could be anyone that needs a bit of encouragement to learn to read and write.

Although you might not know what story it was I read, this was an example of the guided reading questions that I answered this semester for a student sample in regards to the Literacy narratives we learned this school year. Like the guided reading questions for the Argumentative and expository essay, these questions helped me furth analyze what I was reading while putting the rhetorical situations into perspective. It also was the platform that I used when writing my essay trying to answer those questions in my essay. below are some examples from my expository and argumentative essay to show how I understood this CLO.

Example: “Being a catalyst for change, the StoneWall Riots not only started a new civil rights movement but also changed the way “homosexuals” were viewed, allowing them to be out and proud.” (From expository Essay)

This essay fell under the expository genre. The purpose was to write a paper that demonstrated no bias but to tell things as is. Throughout that essay, I refrained from giving my opinion but to tell the story of the Stonewall Riot so that the reader could learn about it and know how things went down.

Example: “This paper seeks to illuminate whether the actions by NYPD against attendants of the stonewall inn were necessary and discuss the legitimacy of the riots that ensued.”(From Argumentative Essay)

This essay fell under the argumentative genre. In this type of genre, there is an argument that the writer is presenting and trying to convince the reader why his side is more valid by providing a counter-argument. This was the thesis from my argumentative essay and from it, you can infer that I was going to present information in a bais manner.

Both of these essays allowed me to explore the different genres that were taught to and how they differ from each other. I kind out struggled with this CLO at first because I didn’t know how to determine what type of genre paper were first and what were the rhetorical situations present. The more I learned of rhetorical elements,  the easier it became to identify them when I was reading a paper. it helped me understand them and how to determine different genres when we did out different assignments such as the letter to our professor, the annotated bibliography, expository essay, and argumentative essay. The thing that helped me the most to understand this CLO were the reflection papers we had to write because it forced me to state the genre and the rhetorical situations present. and  I was able to effectively write papers of different genres while being able to present rhetorical elements in my paper.