Synthesis Paper

                  Before this class, I’ve never been a great writer. I always seem to write papers that are never good enough. My problem is giving explanations and evidence supporting what I wrote about. This makes my papers short and weak. I do not really know why that is, but it’s like I just blank out when writing and do not know what to write. As time has gone on, in this course, I have learned to better my papers and what a paper should really consist of. Great class examples and critiques have also helped with this. Now I have a new approach to writing because of the course outcomes.

                  In the beginning of the course, we learned about the rhetorical principles pathos the emotional principle, logos the logical principle, and ethos the ethical principle. Before learning this, I didn’t even really know what these were or how to apply them. There were many class discussions at the beginning of class that really helped to understand these. Whether it was when we were learning about them, examples, or discussing readings and applying them. We also had a lot of practice with rhetorical principles with writing assignments one and two, the Traditional Rhetorical Analysis paper and the Rhetorical Analysis through Observation paper. With both, we had to identify the rhetorical strategies in the readings we chose to write about. These processes have improved my rhetorical knowledge greatly.

                  Critical thinking is a way to give reasoning about beliefs and actions by reflecting. It connects the claim with the evidence. We used critical thinking with our response papers. Not only would we summarize what we were writing about, it wasn’t about that, but we were supposed to understand and reflect on what we read. That’s where the critical thinking comes in. We used it as a way to reflect on if the claim was true.

                  With writing comes a process. The writer makes a claim, supports it with evidence, and then comes the analysis. Within these, there is also a thesis and argument. The claim provides the reader with a sense of direction about what is being discussed. The evidence is reasoning and support to the claim. The analysis is the critical thinking, and connects the claim and evidence and responds to it. This is the process for basically ever paper we wrote in class and we also saw it in the readings we read in class. 

                  Composing in electric environments can sometimes be distracting, but also can be helpful. There’s a lot of websites that teens are “addicted” to today that can distract one from doing what they are supposed to be doing, but in class we used a way which was very beneficial. In class, we worked in groups to write on Google documents. This made it easy for the professor to see what we were all writing and give us comments, then we could discuss and improve it right then and there. I think it was beneficial in that way.

                  Writing conventions enhance the readability of the paper. I think we did this in class when we talked about how a paper should be written and also with peer reviews. Peer reviews help the writer to improve their papers. These processes have also helped to make me a better writer.

                  Throughout this course, I have learned many outcomes and processes to improve my writing. I have become a better writer, although I may not be the best. I learned new ways to think about what I am reading and writing. I also have learned how to better give support to what I am writing. All in all, I will be able to write better in the future.