Blog: Self-Reflective

How I See Myself as a Reader and Writer

Growing up in a Vietnamese household and being the first generation in America, English is my second language. Therefore, from a very young age I have always thought myself as a weaker writer than most of my classmates. English for me has always been area of weakness in school. This put a lot of pressure on me to be a better writer; I felt the need to excel in English to prove to myself, to my family, and to all my peers that a foreign person can succeed in America. I believe I have come a long way as a writer and I have my family, friends, and teachers to thank for.

English 1020 have taught me the meaning of reading critically and writing well. As a reader, I have learned to read for meaning and read like a writer. These strategies allow me to look at a text in more than one way. When reading a text, I have learned that in order to fully comprehend what the text is attempting to convey, it was best that I read the text multiple times. I am now able to convert my focus from meaning to rhetoric; in other words I am able to convert from what the text is trying to convey to why and how it is conveyed. My writing improved as I begin to master these concepts. To be a good writer I had to be able to understand the text in terms of what, when, why, who, and how. It was important to understand the style of the text such as is it a form of observation, reflective, or rhetoric. Each of these styles of text were studied and analyzed in class. I believe that because we were able to discuss each assign article in class, I learned a lot from hearing what my peers had to say about what they understood from it. Having the opportunity to discuss each article as a class was the most effective part of my learning experience.

Out of all our major writing pieces that we were assigned to do, I believe that my rhetoric piece showed the most improvement because as we spent more time in class discussing about how to be a critical reader and a better writer, I grew as a reader and writer and became better at analyzing a piece whether it is in a text form or a multimedia form. For my rhetoric piece, I used a video from YouTube and just from images that was provided, I was able picking out and understanding the types of rhetorical strategies that the author used to make her argument about poverty such as her use of logos and pathos:
“In the YouTube video, the author uses logos in the form of various pictures and facts to support her argument. The video consists of clips of young children with barely any clothes on, children who looks like they haven’t ate in weeks causing their ribs and joint area to protrude, a woman working in a factory, a homeless man sitting outside next to his cart. All these video clips are her strategy of trying to get us to acknowledge the extent of poverty that some people have to endure everyday. It allows us to see visual images of what it means to live in poverty. Some facts that were used in the video were…” In writing this rhetoric piece, it was important that I understood that her strategy of using logos and pathos was a very important asset of her video because this was what captured the audience attention. I learned that it is crucial to capture an audience attention when dealing with a rhetoric piece because the goal here is to sway the audience.

This class has honestly helped my improved as a reader and a writer; I hope to continue to improve as there is always room for improvement. Not only have this class helped me improve in my English skills, but it have helped with other college courses that I am currently taking such as Anthropology, Human Physiology, and Biochemistry. All these courses require a lot of reading. As I read assigned reading from textbooks for these classes, I find myself really analyzing the text and trying to get a better grasp about what the author what me to understand as a reader. In addition, I’m better at picking out what is important within a text and why it is important. As for my Anthropology class, I just wrote an 8 page paper about different cultures around the world and received 100% on it! I believe I have this class to thank for that. Thanks Joshua!