Project 2 Reflections and SLO Journal

Rhetorical Situation and Genre

A: Analyze, compose, and reflect on arguments in a variety of genres, considering the strategies,

claims, evidence, and various mediums and technologies that are appropriate to the rhetorical

situation.

Sometimes it is not enough to have strong feelings towards a topic, or even all the facts

when you’re trying to convince someone, even yourself, to feel or think a certain way about it.

Vice versa, sometimes logic or feelings are all you need! The more you understand about your

topic, the audience, your chosen media, and how you are articulating your point, the more likely

you are of swaying those listening.

The Rhetorical Strategies discussion was an excellent way of exploring biases and logical

fallacies. This allowed me the time to reflect on what some of my own biases were. Are my

biases helping my Project 2 argument or hindering it? Am I capable of spotting my own biases or

were biases going to take the reigns on my review? It made me hesitate when reading each

article. I didn’t want to pick articles that only served my point of view, but I also felt strongly

about my position.

The discussion board also had me thinking about logical fallacies. One that I was

concerned about was actually a mathematical fallacy. The law of small numbers is when we draw

conclusions from data that has a small or insignificant number for its sample size. In my case,

were these articles actually researching a decent amount of people to come to the conclusions

they did about decluttering? Or was it such a small or biases grouping of people that the results

couldn’t be trusted to be accurate? Reflecting on these types of questions allowed me to step

back and really dissect each article.

B: Describe the social nature of composing, particularly the role of discourse communities at the

local, national, and international level.

This project was interesting in that its social nature was unavoidable, and yet more

passive. We are utilizing other people’s thoughts, ideas, research, to prove or disprove a point.

Yet, it is highly unlikely that we will ever interact with them directly for this project. They will

not read or even know we are using their articles, and we will never know how they could be

affected by how we used their articles. Our readership could overlap or never overlap.

My choice of articles samples didn’t come from local New Mexico writers. They were

either somewhere else in the nation or from a different country all together. One of my articles

sample pooling was all from Germany. Do people in Germany feel the same way about

decluttering as I do? Does it matter what the age, the city, the gender of the person being

surveyed?

The Medium & Audience Journal that we did had me thinking a lot about how we

separate groups of people and how that separation can impact what we write and how we write it.

In one of my articles, the writer was directing their commentary on decluttering specifically at

nurses. The perspective they used dealt a lot more with the stress and balance of a nurse’s life. I

felt it was important to compare and contrast how a view on a specific audience instead of a

broader audience could impact my research question on decluttering.

C: Use multiple approaches for planning, researching, prewriting, composing, assessing, revising

editing, proofreading, collaborating, and incorporating feedback in order to make your

compositions stronger in various mediums and using multiple technologies.

While planning out my research question, I found that the Forming a Research Question

Journal was essential in my writing process. I started off with a completely different topic and

question at the start. Working through the checklist made me realize that the topic I had picked

was not a good fit for project 2. I sat for a long while thinking on what I would like to write

about and compared it to this checklist frequently. I happened to look over at my bookcase and

see The Magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondo, and suddenly it just clicked.

I read many articles before settling on the ones that I had picked. Thankfully, I had many

friends who were willing to lend an ear as I told them my thoughts and goals for this paper. It

helped to have some input from outside sources as to what they thought about my topic’s

strengths and weaknesses. I also found the Peer Review Discussion board to be useful, but oddly

through my own peer reviewing instead. I found that by reading my fellow classmates reviews

that I was able to compare and contrast their writing styles with my own. If I felt something

worked well in their review, I asked myself if I accomplished the same effect or if there was a

way I could make changes for the better.

D: Improve your fluency in the dialect of Standardized Written American English at the level of

the sentence, paragraph, and document.

Part of what makes someone a strong writer is becoming a strong reader. Once or twice

in my adulthood I have had the slight embarrassing moment where I pronounced a word

incorrectly out loud even if I used it correctly by definition. I am learning to instead be proud of

these moments because many of them I have recognized as words I learned from reading. If

you’re reading new vocabulary sometimes you might assume it’s said one way when it is in fact

said another, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to utilize it in your daily life. One of the

first things my language teachers usually always say is to be brave enough to make mistakes. It is

the people who put the effort into obtaining fluency that make progress.

I specifically went out of my way to search for articles that dealt a lot with statistics even

though my grasp on the topic is weak. This required me to do a lot of looking up and research on

terms and phrases I was unfamiliar with. By breaking down new vocabulary, I not only gained a

greater understanding of my topic, but I also improved my understanding of my own language.

E: Analyze and describe the value of incorporating various languages, dialects, and registers in

your own and others’ texts.

Language barriers are not just between two people who speak different languages. This

can also come from people who speak the same language as you or a similar dialect. The more

you learn about and utilize varied isoglosses, the more you expand your understanding of other

people. By utilizing many various languages and dialects, etc. you increase the people you can

reach.
 The Absurd Arguments assignment is actually a good example of this. In one of my past

languages courses we went over how a good indicator that you are becoming fluent in a language

is when you can joke in another language or understand another language’s joke. Humor often

requires a lot of knowledge of culture and on metaphors. English utilizes a lot of metaphors, and

in this discussion board we see a lot of it. One student’s absurd argument was “Dog’s Are Not

Man’s Best Friend” but do all cultures view dogs this way? Do all cultures refer specifically to

the loyalty of a dog as being a “friend” to mankind? Time is a commodity in English, you can

run out of it or waste it, but in China time is like water, time flows regardless of how we wade

through it.

Expanding that kind of understanding will help you as a writer reach more people when

you can explain things to them in a way that makes the most sense to them. It is best when we

are on the same page.

Reflection

F: Evaluate your development as a writer over the course of the semester and describe how

composing in multiple genres and mediums using various technologies can be applied in other

contexts to advance your goals.

Project 2 was a challenging task for me. Research is not one of my strong points. There’s

something intimidating about using other sources, especially scientific ones, and then reviewing

how you felt those articles did. These are well practiced and highly skilled writers and

researchers in their fields. It felt very odd to pick apart their writings even though it was

necessary.
 I felt each step of the project was more difficult than the first project for me to

accomplish. The first one felt smooth, and the flow happened fairly consistently, and I was able

to put together something I was very proud of. This project was harder to believe my work was

up-to-par. I second guessed myself a lot and wondered if I was really going in the right direction.

Yet it is through that struggle that I feel like I have become stronger as a writer. With most things

in life, you improve by practicing and doing. Though I struggled, I still finished each part of the

process. I did not give up at any part of it, and that alone makes me feel like I am moving

forward in my growth as a writer. I feel like the next time I do something similar that I will have

a good foundation to go off of.

Research

G: Use writing and research as a means of discovery to examine your personal beliefs in the

context of multiple perspectives and to explore focused research questions through various

mediums and technologies.

Starting this project off by examining biases and fallacies set the tone of the entire

research process. When I got to the Access to Information/ Credible Sources Discussion Board, I

had already gone through my self-reflections on what I thought and believed during my research

phase. Were these articles just affirming my own beliefs or was I allowing myself to analyze

these sources in an honest way?

This discussion board allowed me to actually map out and be aware of my process of

information gathering. How did I receive my information? How fast did I accept or not accept

what I was reading? Who was telling me these things and why should I believe them? I hadn’t
put much thought to it before, but this discussion board made me realize how I interact with

information. I believe this gave me great gains on improving my ability to pick credible

resources and to keep my own biases in check. However, I also recognize that skills must always

be honed. Outside of this project, this has made me take more time and be more mindful of

where and how I interact with the news, which I feel is a vital skill to have.

H: Integrate others’ positions and perspectives into your writing ethically, appropriately, and

effectively in various mediums and technologies.

Project 2 is about reviewing our secondary sources to our research question. The heart of

this project is the integration of other’s perspectives and positions. If we aren’t checking our

articles and seeing if they are reliable, then we are risking coming to the wrong conclusions to

our own research questions. We are risking putting false information out there for others to base

their own opinions on.

It is also vital to showcase the other sides of an argument. It isn’t just about right and

wrong. It is important to show that you are looking at all points of views and research and still

coming to the conclusion that you have reached. In the Peer Review Discussion Board, one of

my classmate’s asked about the formatting of his annotated bibliography, and me and another

student commented on the importance of allowing your audience to be able to fact check your

work in an easy and accessible manner. If you are confident in your sources and your work, then

it should be a priority for you to want to make it very easy for others to come to the same

conclusion as you. If it is difficult to find the sources you used or if it’s done incorrectly or

dishonestly, it will only make your audience lose faith in what you are saying. At that point, it

doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong if no one believes what you are saying.
I: Compose a research-based academic argument in one of various mediums and technologies by

identifying, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing sources, which must include secondary

sources.

Not everyone is going to become a researcher in their life as a profession, but everyone is

going to research something in their lives. Academic research can seem like this complicated

practice that only a select few can accomplish or need to accomplish, but everyone starts

somewhere. By exploring academic based research, we can really strengthen many parts of our

writing.

We are honing a skill, a process. All of these things; analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing,

etc, are processes that we can use outside of the academic realm. We can take these skills and use

them when we are trying to find the tastiest brownie recipe, when we are trying to figure out who

is most likely to win the Super Bowl. These all are things we can research.

On the other side, it’s good to challenge are brains to think on bigger topics and our own

thoughts on them. Or finding the deeper topic in something that you might have thought

mundane. My first research question was about the impact of fad diets. This came about by just

thinking about how I wanted to lose weight. I had never put much thought into fad diets in

weight before. Suddenly I went from thinking about nutrition as just “eat more salad and less

fast-food” and went down a road reading articles about the science of weight loss, the various

diets were you CAN eat fast-food and still lose weight, the diets that have no evidence to prove

they impact weight loss at all, etc. When you find the thing you are interested in, academic

research feels a lot less intimidating and far more compelling.

understand the different ways of creating and communicating knowledge.

My research question involves many things that deal with ideas and concepts and yet

much of my project is steeped in statistics and surveys. How does one measure happiness and

how does one know where that happiness is tied to? Much of what we compare happiness with is

our own shared experiences. If everyone experiences similar things, does this make it a universal

truth? Does it show a correlation? Many of the questions and scenarios in the surveys created

were related be the average person. Through this simple process, something more complex was

happening behind the scenes: statistics.

Thankfully, one doesn’t need to be a statistic major to understand everything in these

articles. They created easy to understand graphs and straight-forward conclusions to simplify the

findings of their research. However, it is also important to see all of the data laid out completely

even if I don’t personally understand the math. It’s the basic rule of showing your work. That

way someone who does understand the math can verify that the data is sound. This is especially

important for topics where there hasn’t been much research done as of yet. While the negative

aspects of clutter has been explored, my research question dealt with the positive aspects of

decluttering which is still a relatively young topic that has not been explored extensively as of

yet.