English 112 Reflection

                                                   English 112 Reflection

            As we are coming to a close of the semester, it’s usually good to look back and reflect on the progress that we have done.  We were offered with many opportunities that allowed us to experience with different writing styles.  I found that the easiest assignment for me was the advertisement analysis.  When I see something, I really look into depth and explore what it is trying to say.  I want to see if there are any hidden themes or agendas in the picture.  I think this suggests that I am a visual kind of person and I feel like that is true.  The assignment allowed me to explore every detail down to the shadows of the people in the picture.  I found that this assignment was a very creative one and that I perform better on papers where I can be very creative.  

Just as there were easy assignments, I found that I struggled on the Rhetorical Analysis piece.  I felt like this was one of my stronger papers and I was a little shocked when I received the grade that I did.  After looking through the review of the paper, I found out that I did have a lot of errors that needed to be addressed.  I worked through the paper very hard and I came up with a revision that I feel confident about. 

Throughout the semester, my writing has been transforming.  I know understand the importance of topic sentences and ending sentences.  I feel like every paper that we have written, my topic sentences and ending sentences have become stronger and more developed.  This English course has changed the way that I look at writing.  I find that the styles that were introduced to me this semester were ones that I really got engaged into and found myself taking great interest in them.  Overall, this course has been a great experience and has opened me to different types of writing that I feel like I can become proficient in.

           

Work done so far on third essay

I have chosen to rewrite my second essay.  So far, I have done a lot of things to edit my paper.  I have been going through the entire paper and doing all the grammatical revisions that need to be dealt with.  The next thing that I did was organize the paragraphs better.  I went through and picked apart each paragraph individually and made sure that what I talked about in the topic sentence was what was being discussed in the paragraph. I also updated my thesis and made it much stronger than before.  I reworked pretty much every topic sentence along with all of my ending sentences.  There were a few quotes that I had used in my paper that were too long.  I cut them down and added more of my voice then the original piece.  I also added more details to each paragraph and really focused on trying to make it sound more like a rhetorical analysis piece.  I hardest part that I have in reworking this paper is the organization part.  I need to stay on track and really practice my organization skills.  I know that if I keep working hard on this essay and continue to make improvements, this essay will be a really good one.

Essay Three Public Violence

Public Violence is Sweeping the Country

            Public violence is nothing new to our society.  Every day we hear about a shooting in a public area or just some sort violence that is happening around the country.  What we don’t hear is what happens to the victims after the incident.  I was fascinated with an article that I recently read in the New York Times entitled “The Price of Public Violence” written by Alex Kotlowitz.  Kotlowitz recently wrote a piece discussing the issues of public violence and what the effect is on people, especially children.  His argument in this piece is to make clear the effect of public violence and how people can get help for them.  His effective use of strong logos, pathos, and ethos creates an argument that anyone can agree with because they all connect with the reader at a personal level.

With Kotlowitz using facts and statistics to grasp the attention of the audience, his use of logos and pathos is excellent.  He uses a tragic story that is current and many people are aware of to start of the second paragraph. He states “When Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old public school student and band majorette who just a week earlier had performed at President Obama’s inauguration, was killed on Jan. 29, she was standing under an awning in a park with a dozen friends. They all saw or heard it when she was shot in the back.” Kotlowitz knew what he was doing when he picked this story.  This story appeals to logos because it is a factual story and it is known by a lot of people.  The second reason is that the story really strikes people.  The victim was a 15 year old girl and the story plays with people’s emotions.  I feel like the use of such a tragic story right in the beginning of his essay engages the reader’s attention and it was one example of the great use of logos and pathos.  Another example of how Kotlowitz uses pthos and logos is when he refers to one story that a fellow psychologist that he was working alongside with at the high school told him.  She said “one 16-year-old boy whose friend was gunned down in front of him, in the morning on the way to school. The boy, who had been doing well at school, began to drift. When walking through the neighborhood he’d have hallucinations, imagining that he was seeing his dead friend, imagining ways that he might have protected him. “You could see the transformation,” Ms. Stranzl said. “He was present, but he wasn’t. He just felt defeated.”   This description of the story is very vivid and real.  It makes the reader feel so much pain for the young boy whose life was flipped upside down.  It is just another way that Kotlowitz makes his argument more sound and believable.  With Kotlowitz strong use of pathos and logos, he makes his piece almost impossible to disagree with.

There are many effects of being a victim of public violence.  Kotlowitz compares victims of public violence to combat veterans. He says that people who are exposed to public violence tend to show the same behavioral issues later on in life.  Kotlowitz states that “It can lead to outbursts of rage, an inability to sleep, flashbacks, a profound sense of being alone, a growing distrust of everyone around you, a heightened state of vigilance, and a debilitating sense of guilt.”  He argues that if we don’t do something to help these children, then these are the kind of problems they are most likely going to have.  His argument is fool proof.  Any person who reads this piece is not going to want to see someone suffer through all of those problems.  It is another example of Kotlowitz using pathos and logos to add to the effectiveness of his argument. 

Kotlowitz also uses ethos in his piece.  He makes his opinion piece much stronger with the use of his own study.  Kotlowitz spent five months in Harper High School in Englewood, an impoverished neighborhood on Chicago’s south side.  This makes the reader think of how good a person he is for helping out children and it adds to his credibility. He gains the respect of the reader and this boosts his ethos in the essay.  After the reader realizes that the Kotlowitz is a good guy and uses himself in the essay, anything that Kotlowitz says, the reader will most likely believe.  This is because with a heightened sense of respect, the reader will feel more comfortable agreeing with Kotlowitz.  Another way that Kotlowitz boosts his credibility is by using trusted sources.  Kotlowitz uses credible sources such as the Department of Justice to obtain facts.  In his essay he says” The Department of Justice released a little-noticed report that suggested that children exposed to community violence might turn to violence themselves as a source of power, prestige, security, or even belongingness. The report went on to recommend that these children should be treated by professionals.”  Most people are not going to argue with a fact put out by the Department of Justice and that is why I think he uses such a fact.  This also boosts his ethos because he is using highly ranked facts.  Kotlowitz use of ethos is extraordinary and he makes the reader listen to whatever he says.

The last part of Kotlowitz essay that makes his whole argument sound is when he talks about different parts of the country.  When he talks about the different parts of the country, he also is appealing to logos, pathos, and ethos.  It applies to logos because it is factual.  It applies to ethos because it shows the reader that Kotlowitz did his research and is well informed on the topic.  It applies to pathos because it plays on simple human emotion.  People don’t want to see children in pain.  He says “In Philadelphia, there’s a remarkable, albeit small, program, Healing Hurt People, a collaboration of Drexel University’s College of Medicine and School of Public Health, which scours two emergency rooms in the city for young men and teens who have been shot and pulls them in for counseling.”  This information is important because it ties together the whole purpose of his essay.  His argument is more sound due to the fact that it applies to everyone and not just in poor areas.  He finishes his piece by including the use of all three pathos, logos, and ethos to generate a positive response from the reader.

With this information, the objective of his argument is reached.  He posed a question and at the end of his essay he answered it.  He did so with a great use of facts and statistics.  Throughout the entire essay, he kept adding pieces of information that built his credibility as an author.  He engaged the reader the entire time with stories that made the reader really show emotions.  Public violence affects thousands of people every year and Kotlowitz is making a stand for those people.  Often I find that opinion pieces are far from strong and mainly just complain.  Kotlowitz does the opposite and delivers an effective piece and is overall successful at proving his argument.  His use of pathos, logos, and ethos was unmatched by any other opinion piece that I have read.  Overall I feel Kotlowitz was successful in what he set out to do with this piece.