Reflection

Looking back on all that we have covered up to this point in the semester I am surprised how much I have learned. I mean usually at this point the professor will ask you what you have learned so far and all I will be able to give is a half sincere utterance about what I have learned so far in the class that I didn’t know before or that I actually cared to know about. Before this class I knew what rhetoric and composition were, or at least I knew what they meant to me but I didn’t know what they were called or what the different parts of them were.

    

 Key terms for rhetoric are; rhetor, audience, constraints, rhetorical situation, discourse, and exigence.  The exigence is the problem, conflict that is presented to the audience. I always think of the problem at the beginning of the scientific method when I think of the exigence. The rhetor is the person who presents the exigence to the audience. I always think of some politician getting up before people to present a speech. The audience is the group that listens to the exigence and presents possible solutions to the exigence. Discourse is the active discussion between the rhetor and the audience where the audience presents their ideas to the rhetor. The constraints are the things that prevent certain solutions from working. They surround the situation. Constraints can be a person’s morals, ethics, someone’s religion, gender, race, etc. Rhetorical situation is the situation where all of these elements are present. According to Bitzer there can be no rhetorical situation if the exigence leaves no room for discourse. It’s all good and well to know what these terms mean but unless you know what rhetoric is you won’t have a context in which to place the terms. Rhetoric is using discourse or discussion to persuade and audience to your way of thinking.

     Composition to me can’t really be defined. I mean I know that there are theorists that have defined it and all power to them but when I think of the word composition I just think of the process. The steps I go through when writing a paper, the steps that are unique only to me just as they are unique to everyone who composes anything. The process of thinking of the topic, what to write about, debating ideas, finally picking one, writing a page over and over again the idea changing every rewrite and finally the final Composition key terms are genre, medium, language, audience, and organization. Genre is the classification of a composition piece. Can it be classified as fantasy, science fiction, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, novel, etc. Medium deals with what media the piece is presented in, is it a painting, a novel, a short story, a drawing, a poster, etc. Language ties in with audience. Whatever language you use depends upon who your audience is. It can’t be really complicated language if your audience consists of children and it can’t be simple language if it’s an article written for the academic community. The audience is of course whoever will be seeing/reading the piece. Organization deals with the flow of ideas and how well you flow from one idea to another, or in the case of a drawing how well the artist organizes the subject of the drawing to make your eye move around the page.

     There are several terms that overlap for both rhetoric and composition but the one that sticks out to me the most is audience. It’s really important to keep in mind who your audience is for both rhetoric and composition. Writing something for the correct audience could make or break your point.  

     There are more terms for each that I didn’t mention but I picked the terms I did because those are the ones that come to mind when I think about these topics. They are the ones most important to me in my work or the ones that I need to learn to address better.

     I don’t think that knowledge can ever really be ‘new’ anymore. It’s kinda like medias that have been remediated so many times, there are no real beginnings or ends anymore only a continuation of what is already there. Yeah someone may say that they have come up with a ‘new’ idea but have they really, isn’t it more accurate to say that they have taken someone else’s idea and combined more elements to it to make it evolve and change into something unique rather than new. In this way we constantly rely upon other peoples knowledge to go off from. Knowledge to me is information about anything that people take and interpret in their own way to have it make sense to them. In this class knowledge is the conclusions we draw on what we are learning and why knowing it is important to us and our future careers.

     Reflection is the last step in the composing process. It’s when you take a deep breath, clear your mind, look back on the finished piece and think about it. What could you have done differently? What could you have done to make it better? Did you get your message across to the audience properly? These questions and many others are the ones you ask yourself during your reflection. It’s important because after its been turned in you can make yourself an objective third party and see the project in a new light which may call your attention to things that could have been better or things that were really well done. You can then file those thoughts away for the next project and improve while you think about what you could do to make your work better you file those ideas away in your