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.