Rhetoric
In my opinion the term “rhetoric” means using language in speaking and writing to convince and persuade others of what you believe. My experience with the term “rhetoric” and academic conventions comes from all of the rhetorical reading analysis that we did this semester to examine our readings. This semester I was able to identify the author, cite, analyze, give my opinion and summarize the overall context of each passage that we had read. Also we had to take out important quotes from each passage and explain it in our own words. I was able to interact with the text because of the assignments that we had to do such as the source annotations and the rhetorical readings responses. I feel like my ability to summarize and paraphrase primary ideas accurately has improved a lot since I came here. Doing those reading response and source annotations helped me generate ideas and topics for my writing. Those steps helped me a lot in writing my literacy narrative essay and my Proposition 37 research paper, this aspect of studying got me to the point where I could just write my essay right away. It made feel like I had half of my work done because I already had my analysis, quotes and citation ready and I just had to put everything together. I think this skill that this class developed in me will stay with me forever and I’m going to use it in other classes because it’s very useful in breaking down text, analyzing and paraphrasing.