English can actually be good

          English has always been my weakest subject, I’ve always had trouble understanding how abstract things like tone, and syntax, and rhetoric itself work. Since I started in this class, rhetoric started to become clear. Starting to how you described how to better our essays about the movie poster, in which I feel like I did decent. So analyzing visual rhetoric became substantially easier thanks to your class. This was much more fun, than taking some randomly assigned boring visual, like those I’ve had experience with in other English classes. I liked very much how we could come into class and discuss the assignments if we had them, or just converse about topics instead of having endless text being shoved down our throats. For example if we were shown a video, or had a small but meaningful assignment to read before class we could come in class and state our opinions. One signature class assignment was to debate what the outcome of zombies vs. vampires would be. This is a demonstration of how we could openly discuss/ debate the topics in class, and not get bored with plentitude of texts, instead we were allowed to research and use our past knowledge to contribute to the assignments, taking away the time consuming reading. Another way this class helped is that we had freedom over assignments and projects, instead of closed and stately ones, which allowed me to maintain interest in them.

Our blogs themselves were designed to do what they were to do, and you graded very leniently. For example the Halloween scary story was not a boring task we had to do, but it still allowed us to incorporate as much as what we could from what we learned. That day we had to also watch a video about fear itself, which was very informative, and showed us what to appeal to and the biological part of fear too. We could apply what we saw from the videos themselves, and then write our stories using the rhetoric to make it more disturbing or scary.

So for the good stuff that was that, but some of the bad, although there isn’t much of that. I’d rather not have done the writing center appointments, because even though it was helpful in tearing my paper apart, the writing center people weren’t much help for some part. They made me read my paper, and asked questions, but didn’t really provide answers for those questions. Same as if I asked a question, they’d tell me the obvious thing, look it up. So in the end it was a waste of time for me to do that, and I could’ve just worked on it alone, where I wasn’t just reading aloud to another person. In fact after the hour of wondering which grammar was right, we still ended up not completely covering my paper.

Finally this class was an enjoyable one, because there wasn’t a hostile environment, our teacher was a teacher, not just a person to assign us work. There were open ended assignments, I learned how to analyze the rhetoric of visuals very well, and even use my knowledge to produce rhetorically effective papers. I hope that my next English class may go as well as this one. Thank you Ms. B for the treats as well.