An essential step towards the writing skills enhancement is the ability to critically analyze other texts and conduct their rhetorical analysis. During the last four weeks, I was taught how to write annotations, thesis sentences, correctly structure the text and, overall, make my writings more persuasive and compelling. Besides, the most crucial part of the preceding four weeks is that we were forced to write essays and apply theoretical knowledge in practice. The present paper is dedicated to the reflection on classes during the last four weeks.
One of the things that I learned from the classes is to understand rhetorical devices, including oxymoron, parallelism, metaphor, and alliteration, to name but a few. When reading articles, I pay a lot of attention to such details because it helps discover the hidden meaning of the text and understand the authors ideas better. As Harris (2017) puts it, rhetorical devices make text more effective, clear, and powerful. Furthermore, the application of rhetorical devices is a great way to make a text more persuasive and less monotonous.
Another vital skill that I derived from the classes is related to the research one. In the modern digitalized world, information is abundant. This abundance is a double-edged sword. From one point of view, everyone could easily find information on almost every topic. Nonetheless, it is wrong to assume that all sources are credible, and all articles are equally accurate and deserve to be used in a study or an essay. It was crucial to know how essential it is to pay attention to where and when an article was published. Additionally, now I realize the significance of critical thinking and never treat any paper as the only source of truth.
The most important thing that this course taught me is how to write argumentative essays. From first sight, this task seems relatively straightforward. However, the critical point is that now I know how to structure my text properly and save the potential readers of my papers from getting lost in my ideas and examples. Besides, I feel that the language that I use in the writings has become more elegant. Before this course, the writing style was rather messy, and there were no clear distinctions between argument and counterarguments, examples were lacking, and overall, the most frequent reaction of the audience was that a text is missing logic and clarity. Nonetheless, now I feel great progress, even though still there is a lot of work to be done.
The most unpleasant assignment for me was the one on the audience of an essay. For me, it remains unclear how to adjust a text to the needs of the target audience. I suppose that the critical goal of an author is to transmit the message and express his or her thoughts and ideas. Still, I feel confused about altering the text to make it more informative for potential readers. I also feel confused with the application of sensory language because I do not quite understand in which cases it is applicable.
To conclude a reflection paper, I would like to ask you, as an instructor of this course, to share with students the list of authors whose writing style you find worthy of emulate and whose works we should treat as an example. It would be great if the list includes not only some classic authors but also some modern journalists or scholars because reading good papers helps to improve writing skills.
Reference
Harris, R. A. (2017). Writing with clarity and style: A guide to rhetorical devices for contemporary writers. Routledge.