When I was in high school, I started to play at open mic blues jams.  There, the popular format of the 12-bar blues has been ingrained into my skull to the point it’s more retain-able information than how to ride a bike.  Much like the idea of the rhetorical situation has in this class.  Before, I wrote with very little consideration for my audience, and just hope that they liked it.  Now, I write with my audience in mind, which I think has made my papers better.  I was told at an early age to “write like I speak.”  That’s a blessing in one sense, I can get words on a page down quicker than most as a result.  The curse is that it’s more or so “winging it” as I write, which I have gotten better at over the years, but I still struggle with.

This semester I learned how to take my “wing-it” approach and refine it a little bit more, and make it more of a process than a performance, for lack of better term.  With some of my earlier blog posts, those are raw with absolutely no editing or revisions done to them whatsoever.  And I sometimes find that when a work has been revised too much, it can seem to make the work seem less authentic.  If the reader can see the edits and revisions in the final product (without having seen prior versions), that’s not necessarily a good thing.  In that case you’re not effectively using your revisions and hurting more than help.  Whether you edit a piece one or one thousand times, it still must flow as if it was written in one pass.

With the research proposal, I had no sense of “rhetorical situation.”  I was just writing for the sake of writing.  By the time the Research Essay came along, I was writing with things in mind like the audience and things of that nature that I wasn’t considering before.  Sometimes, like in the blog posts, it’s okay to use a slightly informal tone.  However in the Research Essay, a more formal tone has to be taken in order to make it effective.

I’ve gotten positive feedback (mostly) on my blog posts.  I guess my classmates dig my style of writing, or they’re trying to flatter me.  Or they don’t want to use the comment assignment as an opportunity to show me what I’ve done wrong (c’mon people, entertain me here, don’t flatter me).  So I decided to use one of them as an artifact for the Portfolio.  I did the one on the argument that technology makes us dumber, which is a dumb argument in and of itself.  I didn’t feel the need to revise it, it was pretty short and concise and I felt like I made me points well.

Overall, I learned to be more versatile and thoughtful with my writing.  My process has evolved a little bit, and I can probably write better in more situations than before.  I now know what to think about when I write for specific audiences, and why.