Comp II final paper

Keith Pittman

408 South Franklin Ave.

Ames, IA 50010

English Faculty

Des Moines Area Community College

2006 South Ankeny Blvd.

Ankeny, IA 50023

Dear Reader:

At the beginning of Composition II, we were given five goals. These goals were to be fulfilled by the end of the spring semester, which has come much faster than I thought it would. Some of the goals were much like the goal statements for Comp. I. As I’m sure some other students were thinking, I wasn’t so sure if I would be able to complete all of these goals because I didn’t even know exactly what a couple of them meant. For instance; “Demonstrate and analyze rhetorical approaches in texts.” Before this semester I had no idea what this meant. And if I didn’t know what it meant how was I supposed to fulfill that goal? The other goals (critical reading strategies, organization of a paper, research techniques, and using MLA format) I at least knew a little about, so they didn’t seem as hard to me. I found out later that some goals would turn out to be easier than I thought, and some turned out to be much harder than I first expected.

Demonstrate critical reading strategies. I was glad to see something that sounded easy for the first goal, easy compared to rhetorical approaches anyway. I know how to read really well, so what problems could I possibly have? As I found out later, reading well wouldn’t be enough. Critical reading is composed of knowing which parts of the book, article, newspaper, etc are going to help you the most with certain papers, and what to do with the information. One of the best ways to read critically is to highlight important parts and write notes beside the highlighted sections. Not only does the highlighting make it stand out and show that it’s important, by writing down notes you’ll remember why it was so important. One of our assignments for this semester was to read a section in the text book and write a blog about it. This requires you to pay a lot of attention to detail, because you’re going to have to write about it later.

At the beginning of the semester, I had no idea what it meant to demonstrate rhetorical approaches. In fact, I didn’t know what it meant until almost the end of the semester. It actually turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. Rhetorical approaches are basically arguments which the writer shows both sides of. For example, if I were to write a movie review stating why the movie 3:10 to Yuma was outstanding, I would also state how it could have been better or why it was so terrible. It just so happens I did write a movie review on just that movie. As you can see on page (0), I stated why I thought the movie 3:10 to Yuma was such an impressive movie and how outstanding the acting was. For our next assignment, we were to write a letter to the editor and give reasons why this was a bad movie. My reasons included sub-par acting and the glorification of violence.