6.o Introduction

The purpose of this first-year composition course is to provide instruction and writing experiences requiring critical thinking, reading, writing, and research. Through the course readings, instruction, assignments, feedback, and engagement with peers, you will expand your academic and personal writing, rhetoric, and research skills while investigating key issues in our culture and the local, national, and global issues that affect us most directly today. The purpose of Chapter 6 is to lead you through a reflective invention and composing process resulting in a course capstone reflection paper, presentation, portfolio cover essay, or project.

6.1 Reflecting on Your Rhetorical Journey

Over the course of this textbook, you have explored and developed your experience as a multiliterate and metaliterate rhetor and critical writer, reader, and researcher. In Chapter 1, our goal was to lead you through a reflective self-examination of your values, life experiences, socio-cultural influences, general knowledge, and literacies you bring to any rhetorical, academic, or “real world” situation. In Chapter 2, you developed a deeper understanding of what rhetoric is and how we use rhetoric to achieve our purposes in any given rhetorical situation, whether the situation is an everyday, “real life” situation or one that requires academic analysis and critical reading and writing. You were becoming an academic insider to rhetorical knowledge and analysis who could also explain how rhetoric reveals itself in our everyday lives.

In Chapter 3, you learned how to research rhetorically and developed your identity as a competent academic researcher. With an open, inquiry-oriented mindset, you were becoming an academic insider to the metaliteracy practices necessary to investigate a topic, develop a perspective, narrow the research focus, and locate the best external support and evidence to address the narrowed focus. Then, you SIFTed and selected the most relevant and credible sources and applied them effectively and ethically support your rhetorical purpose.  In Chapter 4, you put these skills to work when you developed a researched proposal argument essay and/or project.

With the key task of composing a researched (or “documented”) argument, Chapter 4 required bringing together the critical reading, writing, and research skills you had developed and practiced up to that point. As a college writer with a growing sense of agency, you activated your literacies and rhetorical knowledge to inform and persuade an audience through your well-supported and relevant argument.

Chapter 5 provided explanations and examples to help you develop and integrate your evidence smoothly and accurately into your argument. In addition, you learned more about planning for rhetorical variety in your evidence and purposeful selection of specific types of evidence to make a logical, emotional, or ethical rhetorical appeal. We hope that once you had completed the readings, activities, and assignments in Chapter 4 and 5, you began to recognize and own your growing internal ethos and identity as an empowered rhetor and academic insider.

Now, as you find yourself at the end of this course, we ask you to reflect on all that you have learned and produced in the course to generate a final comprehensive reflection essay and/or project. The first step is to collect evidence from your work.

Collect the Evidence

 Just as you would with any project,  you need data to inform your claims and subclaims and to use later as evidence to support those claims. A review of your assignments throughout the course is a way to begin reflecting in depth on what you have learned, and soon, some ideas will start coming to you as you see patterns of improvement, style, and confidence in your work. 

writE a Focused Free Write

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”  E. M. ForsterThink about your reading, writing, and research work through this semester. Then, set aside fifteen to twenty minutes to write non-stop about your growth through the course, what you have learned that made a lasting impact, the rhetorical skills and strategies you will take from this course, and how you felt through each assignment.

Three Memes Assignment

Create your own memes to reflect your journey. These may end up providing points of connections with other students if you use them as background in the final presentation project.

6.2 CREATE YOUR rhetorical journey TED TALK

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.                                             

-Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French Author

INTRODUCTION

Reflect over your journey through first year composition and create a list of takeaways from the experience.  How did you feel about writing in the college context in the first months compared to now? When you look back at your first papers, what do you notice about them? When you compare your earlier work to your later assignments, what consistent behaviors do you see? Are you ready to take on any college writing assignment your future college professors will assign to you? Why? Why not? What did you learn that you will take forward with you because you now know it forever? Was any one assignment a turning point for you? How would you evaluate your internal ethos as a student writer in the college context? Have you become more rhetorical in the ways you communicate with others? In what ways?

PROMPT

Create a prepared, 5–6-minute TED Talk, supported with a visual presentation and one or two interactive elements to share key takeaways from your participation and classwork in this two-course sequence. Based on your in-depth review and reflection of the courses’ major assignments, select two to three key takeaways from your journey through a year of first year composition to share with your peers in this organized and well-delivered TED Talk-style presentation. Plan to conclude your reflection by describing your internal ethos as a writer and ethical user of information, your sense of agency (empowerment) as a college writer in any context, and your explanation of how your rhetorical knowledge and skill manifest in your daily lives now and in your future.

AUDIENCE

Your audience includes your peers and your professor, so strike a less formal (but still not informal), but friendly tone, and feel free to share some insider humor, memes, quotes, and expressions, we all would understand. Your visual support in your presentation is not your presentation. Your talk is. Have fun with this, but also be sure your points are clear and your evidence and supporting detail are specific. Be sure to pre-assess your “talk” and visual elements against the rubric criteria below and practice your talk several times while looking in a mirror prior to giving it.

PURPOSE

• To learn from your overall experience through a deep dive into reviewing your work and course experiences through metacognitive reflection. (Informed reflection)
• To practice your speaking skills and taking a position as a reflective and rhetorical learner.
• To connect your college literacy development with your own identity as a college student and rhetorically agile writer, reader, and researcher.
• To connect your college literacy development with a sense of agency in communicating your thoughts and presenting your informed opinions and decisions in any rhetorical context.

Works Cited

“E.M. Forster > Quotes > Quotable Quote.” Goodreads. 2021, www.goodreads.com/quotes/26162-how-do-i-know-what-i-think-until-i-see.