I welcome all visitors to this site with warm regard.  I respect any skill and feedback on my abilities in writing, as well as composing an effective web page.  I have, at the very least, tried to make the site as tidy and navigable as possible, so I hope you can find everything well enough.  Now, allow me to explain my personal development from the course:

The biggest skill I have taken away from this semester’s Writing and Rhetoric 170 class would have to have been the critical analysis of information that has developed from the consideration of images, both in and out of specific contexts in the construction of a specific or ambiguous narrative; I have carried over this skill into my Individual and Society course with the Honors Center for the purposes of textual analysis and considering works of literature from less-contemporary perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of them.  Much of the course dealt with this idea that one must scrutinize an idea, image, or concept both from a contextual perspective and at face-value, for a work must be able to stand on its own and convey a sound meaning and it must be able to work in a preexisting context.  However, the course mainly focused on this principle in regard to images and there was very little time for learning about context/no-context with regard to writing.

The focus on image scrutiny, however, has spurred me to look at writing under a new light.  For example, in the compositional analysis of the photograph in Minor Assignment 1, I started noticing things about the image that, had I not been prompted to, would have been unnoticed; lack of facial features on any person in the photo could be related to the serialization and mobilization of young men during the mid-to-late 20th century for the purpose of infantry in war, and how that photo “The Blunt Reality of War” is a microcosm of that ideal.  In any other writing course, it would have been an absent priority to deride such meaning, but now that finding a meaning in the images is a principle, it has lead to a new contextualization of what it means to make connections, especially between texts and images alike.

Beyond learning a new way to look at a subject matter, I have honed my abilities to structure an essay and utilize rhetorical appeals in my work.  Looking back at Minor Assignment 1, I structured the essay into two general sections in regard to the composition of “The Blunt Reality of War”: the perspective the photographer chose and that choice to omit definite facial figures, even on the soldiers standing in the background; I then asked several rhetorical questions about the nature of these compositional choices, choosing to let the holes they left fill with an implied meaning got from the reading audience.  Rhetorical questions are, in my opinion, the one of best ways to poke holes in questionable arguments, which is why I carried the strategy over to Minor Assignment 2, albeit with minor differences.  Here, I organized my analysis into different categories of scrutiny (choice of music, use of text, rhetoric of narrator) with respect to the propaganda film “Japanese Relocation,” the first two or so minutes specifically.  Rather than outright ask rhetorical questions, I chose to present illustrious descriptions from the video and allow the inconsistencies and “red-flags” of the video stand out, and then I would discuss them.  This proved to be an even more effective strategy for analysis, as a more direct critique of events was much easier to write.

Of course, I still need to hone my ability to properly cite sources and make reference to them in my writing, but in terms of actual analysis, I believe I have done well enough.