All started last summer. I needed a class to enroll in, you can assume which class I picked. I chose this class because it caught my attention. Individual and society. What is not interesting about it? Everything about humans is interesting and fascinating. But that was just the theme and the outside part of the class. This class would go deeper than academically speaking. This class would teach me everything the high school said it would do. Everything from the rhetorical terms to the MLA format for essays. 

Being honest, at the beginning of the class I thought all I needed was to understand things and write without grammar errors. It went way beyond that. It all started with the first works we did. The usual, introductions and meeting our classmates. Nothing out of the ordinary. But since the beginning I felt something different. Even though we did not meet a lot I feel that I learned a lot. The rhetorical terms, the rhetorical situation and how to identify them in real life. 

Let’s start with the rhetorical terms. Rhetorical situation, purpose, audience, genre, stance, media/design, and exigence. While reading all the articles we had to read, I learned that most of the situation we’re involved in is a rhetorical situation. A rhetorical situation is every situation in which we have an option. To explain more, I would say that a rhetorical situation consists of a problem, audience and a set of constraints. This can include fights and things of daily life like a family dinner for example.Bitzer was my father in this. From him I learned everything I know about rhetorical situations. I remember this article he wrote explaining how a rhetorical situation works. He gave an example of a girl offering some help to a man. At that moment I knew we live a lot of different rhetorical situations everyday. Now, if we talk about the rhetorical terms the conversation takes a different route. I knew these terms but I do not think I never fully understood them. We can assume some of these terms, like audience, purpose and stance but the real thing comes identifying them in a rhetorical situation. The purpose is the goal that the author of the rhetorical situation, the audience are the people witnessing this situation and the stance is the position the author of the rhetorical situation has towards the things he or she is delivering. Besides these terms, the media/design and exigence can be assumed too. The design is literally the design or the way the author is delivering his/her purpose. The exigence is simply the problem or discomfort the author of the rhetorical situation wants to solve. On the other hand, genre is not what it sounds like. The genre is some sort of pattern in a rhetorical situation, something that is common. 

When it comes to my progress I think I made a lot of it. Especially in my understanding. The assignment “Freud’s three idea about hysteria” is one of the first assignments I did. That assignment shows the old me. I remember the amount of time I invested on that assignment. Even though I struggled a lot I think I did a decent job. On the other side of the story, my assignment “James Baldwin and Sigmund Freud critique society” is a proof of my progress. In that assignment I felt way more comfortable and sure of myself. I had a wider understanding of the general theme. These two assignments represent the progress I made. Maybe not in the material context of it, the grammar and the way I use to express myself, but in the way I understand texts when I read them. I used to read things once and maybe twice but with the material in this class I had to read more than four times. Reading and understanding  are two things that should go hand by hand. Sometimes, mostly in classes like this, we read just with the purpose of finding what we are looking for but without really understanding the material. This is a major mistake since all the information given to us is always valuable in some way. 

I would like to express the Course Learning Outcomes of this class and how I achieved them or not. Explore and analyze genres and rhetorical situations. Throughout the course of this class we read a lot of articles and texts. Among these texts were many on rhetorical situations. A lot of the assignments we did were based on reading and analyzing the meaning behind these readings. I think I improved in this aspect but not as much as I would have liked. I am still having problems interpreting the words and finding the meaning they hide. The next outcome is the development of strategies for reading. In this case, we identified a lot of the readings we did, thus, we learned how to identify different types of readings. With this, came to mind the different ways of approaching readings. Some readings require reading them multiple times and others require a deeper analysis and search of background. We learned how to revise and edit through the many peer reviews we did. During these activities we had to take our work and modify it based on the comments we received. Through these peer reviews we also achieved engaging in the social aspects of the writing process and understand the technology to address a range of audiences. A lot of us as classmates kept in touch during big jobs, this way we could help each other and minimize errors. With these peer reviews we also learned how to use our tools to address our audiences. Most of the time the ones judging my work were my classmates and the Professor Von Uhl would do it. Taking this into account we were prepared with an idea installed in our mind of how the classmate judging our work would react. With our last paper, the Critical Research Analysis Essay, we were obligated to learn how to locate research sources in order to complete our work. We achieved this through various lessons from our professors and  also a couple of library sessions. In this library session we learned how to navigate the internet in order to find scholarly articles and texts. Also, we were taught how to identify articles and how to find the ones we need, through filters and some tricks such as the quotations marks used to specify a search. During this same essay we had to include research in our writing but most of the time we just had to make an argument. All this work taught us how to properly take a position and develop and argument.