Q1 THEME: THE AMERICAN DREAM
This quarter, the theme was The American Dream. The american dream is what people strived to have long ago. They dreamed of having many things. For Example, people wanted to be able to have enough money to maintain a large family or be well educated and have good careers. This quarter focuses on how the American dream influenced an entire era. In this quarter, essays, papers, and prompts were focused on.
PRECIS RHETORICAL PAPERS
Precis papers are like summaries of pieces of texts. In this unit, we wrote precis papers for a columnist. We had to choose one columnist and write our precis papers for consecutive columns that they wrote. We wrote a total of 5 precis papers in this quarter. My columnist was Gregory Kane. He wrote about social and racial issues mostly throughout his columns.
THE GREAT GATSBY
We read the book "The Great Gatsby" this quarter which represents the American Dream. This is one of the most successful novels that involve the American Dream. It is about two men that have different lives and a different way of living. One is successful after being poor and working at a farm. He achieved the American Dream.
DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS AND DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
We compared the Declaration of sentiments by Stanton and the Declaration of independence by Jefferson. We did an analytical essay comparing how they both used different types of rhetorical strategies. We used rhetoric and structures on how to build a 9 essay. We also wrote a formal paper on the declarations and how they were different and the same.
TIMED WRITING
Our timed writing was us practicing how to write a synthesis essay within a certain amount of time. This helped us to be able to write in a quick way like we would in the AP essay. It helps us prepare with our writing skills. It also helped us to develop our ideas quickly and be able to write them down as they came to us and finish on time.
REFLECTION FOR QUARTER 1
This quarter, I learned many new skills that involve writing and other strategies. I think that the different assignments that we did this quarter helped me to better advance in rhetorical writing and writing essays. I enjoyed the different creative ways that my teacher put together different assignments that we had fun doing. I am really looking forward to doing similar things this quarter.
Q2: IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND RACE
This quarter, the theme was about identity, culture, and race. During this quarter, we read books about the theme, we wrote essays, and had group discussions that dealt with it. We read a novel named "Their eyes were watching God" where the author focused on the theme and we also wrote a synthesis paper on what identity was to us. Identity is not the same for everyone. So in this quarter the big question was, " What things make up identity?"
THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD One of the rhetorical devices that Hurston used was symbolism. She uses symbolism throughout the novel and it is a strategy that she uses in order to bring her point across. Hurston's theme in my opinion was based on gender and how that plays a role in the meaning of everything. Also, the theme that Hurston portrays is gender based and she uses many other strategies to emphasize this as well as send a message to readers.
Hurston said "Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly" Here, Hurston is talking about women and how they act. That women have dreams but sometime they realize that their dream are not realistic and that they can't obtain them. This is one way that Hurston builds her theme is by ethos.
Another quote that is in Hurston's novel is "he hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule ud de world so fur as Ah can see." Here, she is saying that basically women, black women specifically get the worst type of life. She is arguing that the white men are above the black and women are "mules" so she uses a metaphor here in order to let the readers know how women are seen and treated in society. Of course she sees this as everyone treats black women as if they were animals and that's why she compares it to that.
COLUMNIST PRECIS PAPERS This quarter we chose another columnist to do the five precis papers. The columnist that i chose to do was Debra J. Saunders. Saunders is a political, social, and current event writer. Saunders definitely uses logos in all of her columns. She uses logos because she writes about mostly political events. This is helpful to her because it gives her a more credible appeal to her audience.
Basically, Saunders uses ethos and logos and even sometimes pathos to advance her arguments. She uses them to express her overall opinion on certain subjects. For example, she once wrote a column on the current political status and she included actual statistics in there to prove the behavior of the american people when it came to electing the president.
Saunders also uses ethos to make a credible appeal to the audience. In her columns she gives important reasoning to prove her point to the audience. When she writes her columns she does it to inform. Her objective seems to always be about informing rather than persuading, although she does in some. Ethos helped her be a more effective columnist because it makes people sort of rely on the information that they are given.
Q2 SYNTHESIS PAPER FINAL DRAFT
This quarter, our synthesis paper dealt with answering the question about what identity is? I wrote a 3 page paper explaining what identity was to me. To me, identity is made up of both race and culture because they are both significant factors when it comes to people being able to identity us especially in the generation at which we stand in today.
SYNTHESIS PAPER REFLECTION
This included how many lines, syntax, rhetoric, and many other things that are included in the paper. This helped to point out the most important things of my paper and reflect on what I could have done better.
Q2 REFLECTION
This quarter, I learned about the different meaning of race. Although, I have to admit that writing synthesis papers isn't my best thing. I run out of ideas and I can't exactly make it one page long... Honestly though, I think this synthesis paper came out better than the last. The most meaningful assignment that we did this quarter was the synthesis paper. This helped me out a lot because even if it is a lot of writing and thinking, I sincerely think that it will help me in my weakest spot which is composing an essay.
I wish we would have skipped the Hurston book. I did not find it interesting and I did not find it useful in my honest opinion. I wish we would have had more discussions though because sometimes when you hear other aspects especially from your classmates, it makes you grasp those ideas and adapt them in a useful way. In quarter 3, I am looking to of course improve on my synthesis paper and to write better essays. I am not sure if we will have precis papers but those are pretty fun.
