Final Reflection

--Coming into eRhetoric, I would have stated that I was a very technology aware individual—my major area of interest is consumer electronics. However, I quickly realized that I knew very little about what defines eRhetoric. It was kind of fun to go back and look at my first blog response: “Monday night, just finished first day of sophomore year. I have been up since 6am, since we had morning running. This is my first official assignment, creating a blog, which is kind of fun. To think that this summer I didn't even know what a blog was!” This is not the only example; until about a third of the way through the quarter I did not understand the principle behind a “wiki,” and did not know that Wikipedia was an editable database of information. It was not until we watched the video of the Wikipedia article transformation that I really understood the principle behind the wiki. I quickly found out that my knowledge of new written technology was much more limited than I initially thought.

--However, this has all changed throughout the course of PWR II, as I now have a greater understanding and appreciation for everything that eRhetoric encompasses. As such, this knowledge helped me grow as a writer, because I became more aware of different writing styles and tones for different situations. I was able to see situations where I felt the author did a poor job of this, such as in the Cripps article. I felt that the format of the web page did not match the academic tone that Cripps was employing in his writing. All of the elements have to work together to make a successful piece of writing; if one detracts from the other, it detracts from the whole article.

--In particular, I very much enjoyed our study of Power Point presentations. Ian Parker’s article “Absolute Power Point” was a great read. I did not use Power Point extensively in high school, but I used it enough to be proficient, so I could relate to the material that Parker was referring to. I think it is very important to know how to give an effective presentation, especially because I can foresee myself giving a lot of these types of presentations in the future. Through watching many of my classmates’ presentations, I became very skilled at picking up the rhetorical appeals of logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos. This was something we didn’t really cover in-depth in my PWR I class, so I had a lot to learn. From the presentations I was able to see instances where students were quite successful at this, such as when Nate gave his proposal presentation with no technology and a very informal tone because he was talking about the ways that things like instant messaging were changing modern English. We looked at other successful versus unsuccessful speeches when we examined the contrast between Steve Jobs’ speeches at the Stanford Commencement and the MacWorld convention. These videos showed me the power of ethos, because Jobs had a much different ethos at the Stanford Commencement, where he seemed intimidated and out of place, as opposed to at the Macworld convention, where he was very comfortable and casual talking about Apple’s latest and greatest products.

--I can confidently state that I met all three of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the quarter. Not only did I learn how to keep a blog and improve my knowledge of internet writing, but more importantly I became comfortable working in groups. Looking back, I can now see that the first two of these three goals were very basic—things that would be met just by taking the course. To revise these goals for my future work in writing and presentations, I would add: 1) I would like to become more comfortable giving a Power Point style presentation without having to rely on my speech notes (I would like to be able to have a general idea of what I am going to say and then be able to adapt from there) and 2) I would like to improve my concrete language in my academic papers. These are the two areas I discovered in eRhetoric that I could use the most work on, and I think improving in these areas will benefit me greatly in the business world. Overall my experience in eRhetoric was very worthwhile and enriching, and I am very glad that I was able to take this course.