For my Coggles, I chose to build off of option one, which asked my to outline my essay prior to writing my first draft. I found this to be a very helpful activity because I was able to track my thoughts about the essay throughout the entire process, and I found that whenever I got lost or stuck, I could just read back on my thought process to get back on track, or if I was confused on where to go next, I referred to the essay prompt to see what connections I was missing. After recording my brainstorm, I ensured that my mind maps accurately outlined my essay by checking if what I wrote answered the prompt I chose-- which is the comparative rhetorical analysis prompt-- in a logical way. While rechecking my work, I put myself in the shoes of my reader, seeing if my thoughts flowed in a coherent and understandable way, and when it did, I knew that I had achieved a logical structure that I could use for my essay.

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This entire week had been dedicated to creating this first RA draft, and to be honest the work, to me, paid off. I started the week by first contemplating what texts I wanted to focus on, and I decided to concentrate my comparison between Barbaro and Anzaldua because their mediums of text were vastly different, which intrigued me the most, yet they were able to craft their work in a way where they both came to the same message: America labels to oppress. To narrow down my focus for the essay, I had to ask myself "what did each rhetor do that allowed me as a reader to understand that they both have the same message, considering the difference in their mode of text?" And because I asked myself this, I was able to identify that what had gotten me to understand their message was how they both invoked an emotion in me as I was reading their texts: for Barbaro, it was sympathy for Carlos, and for Anzaldua, it was frustration from constantly translating her Spanish. And unfortunately, this is where I got stuck. I knew I wanted to talk about how each rhetor persuaded readers to feel a certain emotion, but I did not know where else to go from here. Luckily, I attended Professor Delany-Ullman's office hours, and there, she helped me understand the prompt more clearly. She explained to me the importance of audience, the original audience that the authors intended their work to be for, because each author builds their text with their own audience in mind, since they must tailor their messages such that the people in their audience can understand what they are saying and come to the conclusion that the rhetor wants them to--and this is what I need to illustrate in the essay. It was good that I was able to ask myself about my own experience as a reader for each text, but now I needed to expand my thoughts to make connections to the author's actual, intended audience. I had to think: "who were the people who made up the audience? What did they expect? What did they already know or believe? What would the rhetor consider about them when creating the text?" Before this day, I knew I have always had trouble with understanding audience, and it evidently showed in my first exploratory draft, for I lacked a clear connection to audience. But knowing this, this is why I chose to go to office hours: I knew I needed help, and fortunately, because I chose to go, I was able to further my understanding of the assignment. I expanded on my original idea about the invocation of emotion now that I was able to think with the original audience in mind, and I had to repeatedly ask myself: what did these emotions do for them?

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During the couple of days after office hours, I had to focus on brainstorming the essay now that I was able to understand what I needed to write about, and because I went to office hours, I knew I needed to focus on specific questions, particularly regarding the connection between rhetorical elements and audience, instead of going in endless circles as I did before. I created handwritten mind maps, outlining my train of thought for each text while I pondered about how each rhetor creates emotion for their readers. By doing this, I identified two specific rhetorical elements each rhetor utilizes: Barbaro creates a specific sequence of events in his podcast--one where he first characterizes Carlos as a model citizen, and then suddenly exposes the reader to his deportation-- and compounds somber music with this narrative to invoke sympathy, whereas Anzaldua constantly switches between Spanish and English and creates a inconsistent structure in her text to irritate readers and invoke frustration, and I was able to expand on these ideas by continually asking myself how the emotions pertained specifically to these audience, why the emotion was important, and how the emotion connected the audience to the rhetor's message.

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After creating these mind maps, I attended office hours again on Thursday to check if what I had written was correct (although, at the time, I had only finished Barbaro's mind map and partly finished Anzaldua's). After getting Professor Delany-Ullman's approval, I was able to begin on my draft. Fortunately, because I had basically outlined my entire essay with the map, the structure of my draft was clear to me; the hardest part I had to conquer was how I was going to word the introduction, specifically the thesis, and how I was going to stay under the word limit, which was a thousand. Reaching over the word count has always been a significant problem of mine, and over the past 7 weeks, I have gotten better at editing my work to take out filler words and rephrasing my thoughts to abide by the word limit. But I knew staying under the limit for this draft would be very difficult: and it was. At the end of creating my draft, I was almost 150 words over. Consequently, I had to take the next few hours to effectively edit my draft; however, because I had to do this--because of the word limit--I felt as if I could not get all of my thoughts across, for there were more details I had wanted to add, but I had to refrain from including them. This is one thing I believe I must continually work on-- that is, I know I must continue honing my ability to express my thoughts concisely because if I am too wordy, I may end up confusing my readers and not getting to the point at all.

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On that reflective note, I would like to end my blog. Thank you, again, for clicking in! Stay tuned for an update on the RA process!

 

Until next time,

Joanne

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