English? Nah. Real Life? Yah.

 

I came into a freshman composition with the mentality that I am going to dread the class. As if I was starting school and my mother had to drag me to class. To my surprise, the class was more about understanding language and rhetoric rather than constant book reports. Throughout the class we learned about rhetorical reading, narrative writing/self-reflections, creating thesis statements and synthesizing sources. I was able to not only understand the purpose of Amy Tan or June Jordan’s writing, but I could understand how they told their story using Aristotle’s three rhetorical appeals. During the time of taking this course, it has greatly assisted me in my reading and writing abilities.

 

Phase One

Phase one embarked our journey on language and literacy. At first, I found the pieces we were reading and watching to redundant since they were all explaining the same idea: people are treated differently because of their accent and their English. These were shown in the rhetorical situation worksheet we had to do for Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” (Tan) and Safwat Saleem’s “Why I Keep Speaking Up Even When People Mock My Accent” (Saleem). Both Tan and Saleem have a unique experience with English, but they somehow both felt little compared to their peers. Tan being embarrassed from her mother’s broken English or Saleem being bullied because of his Pakistani accent. Reading these pieces empowered everyone in the class to write about their experiences. I wrote about how I was discriminated as a kid for speaking Turkish at home and being bullied since I am Muslim. I used a lot of descriptive adjectives to put the reader in my shoes, such as “walking into the classroom, I was hesitant to see all of the new faces. The endless thoughts of ‘what will they think of me?’ was looming over my head. I was prepared, with my notebooks and pencils in my little Hello Kitty backpack.”

Not only this, but I was constantly relating my story to the constant idea of how language isn’t as important as it is made in society. I wrote, “sure, we [the students] may not speak a lot, but speaking isn’t the only means of communication. With our hand gestures and body language, we were able to communicate fluently [to the class].” Also, relating the idea of language to stereotypes and how one person shouldn’t set the “norm” for the rest. Writing this narrative gave me insight on how messed up our society is; how immigrants are praised in America yet in reality are shunned. After meticulous editing by peer review, I perfected my story by keeping my voice and ideas throughout, all while being as realistic as possible.

 

Phase Two

Phase two consisted of rhetorical analysis and understanding the author’s appeals. A personal essay we spoke about a lot in class was June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” (Jordan). Her piece was really influential, and I wanted to write my paper on her essay. She had multiple stories interwoven throughout her one essay and they beautifully meshed together. “The way she developed the essay was almost like a story where she was teaching her students Black English, and then they used Black English to spread the word that a fellow African American was brutally killed by police. The story within the essay definitely comes full circle and unfortunately it was quite ironic.”

During the class we learned about Aristotle’s three rhetorical appeals, pathos, logos and ethos. Even though I understood what they were and their significance, I didn’t think of using it in the draft of my rhetorical analysis essay. I received feedback from the professor to implement it and it completely changed my paper. “She uses pathos, evoking emotion by starting off by contextualizing the topic because these students have fought so hard to un-learn Black English, but she teaches them Black English anyways.” Then I go into explaining the implications of this portion making a reader feel downhearted since they’re betraying their culture to become “Americanized”. Next, I say “the question is, do you choose your culture or fitting into society?” I believe I did an amazing job at explaining Jordan’s use of pathos. I also wrote about logos and ethos, but my usage of pathos really stuck with me. I broke down the purpose of Jordan’s writing then used a certain instance where it was clearly illustrated and broke it down even further. After implementing the rhetorical appeals, it made my essay much stronger.

 

Phase Three

Finally, we had phase three which consisted of a research essay. I was excited for this phase because I have more experience with research papers, and we had the freedom to choose our topic. My topic was how impactful imagination is on people with disorders. The assignments that we had definitely helped with organizing our thoughts: starting with a brainstorm, finding our sources, creating an annotated bibliography, rhetorical precis and synthesizing our sources. Not only did these assignments help organize, but it helped see what sources were redundant, not credible or even stray away from your topic. I really enjoyed the synthesis worksheets, because it was an outline of your body paragraphs. Not only are you meshing the ideas of two articles together, but you get to put your own twist on this information to suit the thesis of the paper. I primarily got my sources from google scholar since the library’s database wasn’t properly working for me. I really enjoyed that in the professor’s PowerPoint, she included a slide on different commands in google to help us find our sources. Personally, during high school my research papers were more science based, therefore used APA citations, so using MLA for this paper definitely broadened my knowledge on citations which will be useful throughout college. Even though there’s no clear-cut way to write a research paper, I feel that this phase has definitely taught me tricks to create a well-rounded paper that has a clear thesis, sources that support my thesis and evaluating the evidence efficiently.

Reflection

All in all, this course has taught me a lot. Honestly, I feel that my writing was pretty good before coming into this class, but now I feel more confident. This course has definitely validated my writing and showed more of the tactics used in pieces. Now it is my turn to implement the knowledge I have learned from this course and apply it to my day-to-day work. Phase one taught me about rhetoric and an author’s voice in a piece. Phase two taught me about the purpose of a piece and the appeals to pathos, logos or ethos. Phase three taught me organization, choosing sources and rhetorical précis. Most of all, this course has taught me the significance in language and literacy in our everyday lives. How no matter where someone comes from, you should give them an equal opportunity to express themselves rather than judging them for their “broken English” or their accents.

 

Bibliography

Jordan, June. “Nobody Means More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1988, pp. 363–375., doi:10.17763/haer.58.3.d171833kp7v732j1.

Saleem, Safwat. “Why I Keep Speaking Up Even When People Mock My Accent.” Ted Talk, 2016. www.ted.com/talks/safwat_saleem_why_i_keep_speaking_up_even_when_people_mock_my_accent.

Tan, Amy. “Mother tongue.” The Threepenny Review 43.7 (1990).