Letter of Encouragement to Me

Dear future me,
Hello, if you couldn't tell from the title, this is past you. Now, if your reading this I assume that you need encouragement of some sort, so I'll give it a go, but no guarantees, we both know this isn't my strong suit, spades have always been our strong suit. Joking aside, not really, if you need encouragement, it means your probably stressed about school, that seems like the thing most likely to stress you. In which case, I will remind you that you we are a very intelligent person, so if you just buckle down and keep up with the work, you will be 100% fine. If in the likely case that you are stressed because you have 20 hours of work due in 2 hours, then drink some coffee, relax, prioritize and work faster than a Roman orchard slave, told you the jokes wouldn't stop, and you'll be relatively fine. If the situation is the homework equivalent of the Hindenburg, then I highly suggest bot caring, its work pretty well for us before, so why not try it again?
If your stressed/upset/losing confidence about something other than school, then I probably can't be of much help because, as I'm sure you know, I have no idea what twists and turns have happened in your life and even less idea which one you fell off of, though if I had to guess I'd say it probably involves one of your ideas that only you understand, take note of that warning future me, or that Skynet has taken over, in which case FIND JOHN CONNOR. But, if its not those things, just sit back, and read this letter, enjoy the jokes I have put in here, we like those, and get back on track. Remember the only thing standing in our way of ruling the world is ourselves......... and our current lack of a Deathstar.
hoping you can fix my future,
Past you.
 P.S. We are the not Delorean featured below in the past, this is just a picture that fits the time travel theme of this letter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_time_machine

Content of Letter to my Former Self

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hillbillyholiday/Tabloid_Terminator

If I could write a letter to my former self before the beginning of this semester, I would stress the importance of not procrastinating. One of my greatest weaknesses is my tendency to think, "I can do it later," when confronted with any sort of work. This tendency has always been a part of me and was problem throughout the semester; I ended up writing several important papers at the last second and the grades I received reflected this. Unfortunately, being practical and cynical as I am, I think it would be unlikely that former me would take such a letter seriously and would probably say something like, "Time travel isn't real so this letter is obviously not from future me and therefore not important." Which means, that even if i were able to send a letter into the past to past me, it would have little to no effect on my semester.

Reflective Essay Oragnizing Idea and Thesis

1.My growth as writer can be seen through the changes I made in my QRG in order to improve the organization, conventions, and analysis present in the assignment.
2. I was able to improve as writer this semester because the difficulty and complexity of the assignments in this class forced me to alter my writing process to improve my writing.
3. This semester I learned that my strengths as writer were prewriting, and rhetorical analysis while my weaknesses were my writing process and my word choice; these strengths and weaknesses determined the course my writing took throughout the semester.
4. This semester my writing was forced to change by the course objectives if this class, which helped to develop me as writer.
5. during the course of this class, my writing process developed because of the mandatory prewriting and the complexity of the assignments; this change in my writing process caused me t develop into a better writer by increasing the organization and the quality of the content of my work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedling

I believe that reflecting on my writing process will be the best organizing idea for my essay. This organizing idea lends itself most to analyzing instead of summarizing the changes that I have made during the semester. Also, the biggest change in my writing that i experienced during the semester came in my writing process, which makes this the most logical organizing idea for me to use.

Audience and Invention for Reflective Essay

I want to discuss how I have improved as writer over the past semester. I want my audinece to understand how I have improved as writer and what i have learned about myself as writer.

My primary audience is my professor; my secondary audience is myself.

My audiences already know what my writing looks like and how it has changed throughout the semester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_Mirror,_Nottingham.jpg

I will probably outline a point about my writing and then support the point with evidence to convince my readers about what I am saying.

I will establish my ethos by writing passages that reflect my ethos in the essay.

Discovering my Writing Process

I consider myself to be a strong technical writer but one with erratic process and a procrastination problem that limits how good my writing can be.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/28154346@N07/8077848448

I have changed my approach to writing this year because I have been forced to pre-write and draft for this class. Otherwise, I would not have changed my process.

The rhetorical analysis assignment caused me to change the way I look at writing rhetorical analyses which changed my approach to writing them.

My writing process usually looks like me furiously typing the first ideas that come to mind the night before an assignment is due. This changed this year because of the pre-writing and drafting that this class required.

I ended up having to try an organized approach that didn't involve doing entire assignments the night before they are due because of the structure of the class. I believe that this a more effective process than the one I had been using, but realistically, I will probably end up going back to my previous method whenever possible.

Refugee Rhetoric

The context of this political cartoon is the recent push by many governors to prevent refugees from Syria to settle in their states. The audience of this cartoon are the people who oppose letting refugees into the country. The cartoon is meant to remind them that the Europeans who first came to America from Europe were refugees from religious persecution in Europe, and that without the help of the native Americans who already lived in America, they would probably have perished. In order to understand the cartoon, the audience needs to have knowledge about how America came to be settled by Europeans.

Background Research

This is the link to my research about the decreasing use of the curveball in professional baseball.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/4946926845

Initial Thoughts about Audience for my Argument

There is no such thing as the general public because everyone has different tastes and interests, which means that no matter what subject you are writing about, there will always be people who cannot be persuaded or who did not care about your topic.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mhatrey/6968211400

People who are not nihilists but are open to the idea of becoming one, or people who are interested in the different philosophies that people live by are likely to be interested in my topic and argument. Most people have at least heard of nihilism but many are unlikely to be familiar with what it really is and will have a limited understanding of it. Anyone who enjoys the informing themselves about issues using the medium I will use to make my argument could encounter it. People who believe that everything in life has meaning and that we should care about it might oppose my argument. My audience will need to understand what nihilism is in order to understand my argument.

My Proposed Public Argument

When thinking about what topic to work on for this project, I decided that I did not want to do a technical paper about something in my field. I decided that I wanted to do something more informal because I've always liked writing and arguing informally better than writing formally, and I think I'm better at it. This led me to search for a topic, but I initially came up blank.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/158082293

 I thought if a possible topic Thursday night while watching The Big Lebowski before I went to bed. In the movie, "The Dude" and Walter are antagonized by a group of nihilists; I have always thought nihilism is a vastly underrated philosophy for living one's life. This gave me the idea to write an argument about how nihilism should be adopted and practiced by many people. I then thought about what medium would best this argument. After much thought, I decided that either a TED Talk or an opinion/editorial column would be the best medium to express this view. Both are mediums that allow an argument for something to be made in an informal way while still being an effective means of communicating an argument. Currently, I have not decided which one to use for my final project, and may not for a little while longer; I might draft both and choose which one I think is better. It'll really depend when I have a good idea or realize procrastination is no longer an option.

Change of plans, I will actually be writing a piece to be entitled, the Wrongful Death of the Overhand Curveball, which will detail why the overhand curve has fallen out of favor in major league baseball and then argue that should not have fallen out of favor and that it is the most effective pitch in baseball.

Analysis of a Public Argument

The tone of the letter is very formal, this tone conveyed by formal word choice and language. The author chose to use a formal tone to show her respect for a government official.

the author uses the formal tone and the convention of writing directly to a person in the formal letter. The formal letter is an appropriate choice of genre for the author's argument because it allows her to convey her opinions to the governor herself.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Brewer.jpg

She establishes her ethos at the beginning of the letter by saying that she is a freshman at the University of Arizona. This is not effective because an experienced government official is unlikely to listen to a college freshman on matter of policy.

Her claim is that cutting medicare is not the best solution to the state's budget problem and would hurt more people than it helped. She supports this claim by offering alternatives to the budget cuts that she believes would be more beneficial to the state than the current plan would be.

Her call to action is to prevent cuts to medicare. It is clear what she wants from the letter; everything in the letter relates back to her goal of preventing cuts to medicare.

I would have suggested she provide more concrete evidence to support each of her proposals to prevent cuts. I would also suggest that she spend more time explaining why the current plan is not the best plan available. Also, this letter could have benefited from statistics supporting her ideas.

Reflection on Rhetorical Analysis

" Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets." Joeseph Conrad,Heart of Darkness
 
I was not able to learn as much about my writing process from this paper as I had hoped to because the process of writing the paper took on many of the qualities of Marlow's search for Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. The paper started as a normal writing assignment, I had done several rhetorical analyses similar to this one before and had found them to be very easy to complete. I thought that this paper would be no problem at all.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brtsergio/60213977

The trouble began when I had 3 midterms, and big engineering project, and a math test in the week before the draft was due.  This left me very little time to work on the draft which caused me to write the entire ting on a Saturday night. This wasn't a problem at first, my ideas seemed to make sense and and the paragraphs came together nicely. Then, I started to get tired; my ideas became bizarre, my thoughts discernible only to me, and the lights of my laptop swam before my eyes. but, tired as I was, I decided to continue writing until the paper was finished, and so created the Kurtz of my paper writing experience.

 After meeting with Dr. Bell on Monday to discuss my paper, I realized just how , misguided, cluttered, and warped my paper had become. But, underneath all of these detractors and flaws, I saw greatness. Some of the ideas I had placed in my paper struck me as very good, maybe even brilliant, but they needed to extracted from the muddled morass of grammatical errors and run on sentences that was my paper. So began my trip up the river to find the greatness that I knew must be there. I would spend hours focusing on idea, or sometimes even a single sentence, slowly trying to flush out the good ideas from the nonsense. Every time I was able to successfully do this, a sense of glee and vindication filled me; my draft hadn't been bad, it had only been misunderstood, I would soon be able to show myself and the world this, all I need to do is clarify another sentence or two...........

And so it went until the deadline for the paper. I now realize that I probably would have been better off tearing down my paper and completely rewriting many parts of it instead of going up the river and into a rhetorical heart of darkness. The only other thing I was able to learn from this experience was that minuscule differences in word choice and meaning can have a big effect on the meaning of a paper.