Final Reflection

The theme of culture, identity, and society was displayed throughout this course in our many different assignments.  Visual rhetoric was our first assignment.  We are so blind to all of the rhetoric around us.  We have adapted to the culture of today's society and this has made us incapable of recognizing the rhetoric all around us.  In our second assignment, we did a research paper.  My paper was on lowering the drinking age to 18.  Culture and society today have influenced teenagers and young adults today to make them believe that your "identity" needs to be a certain way.  You need to dress a certain way, look a certain way, act a certain way.  Well in my paper, I talked about the drinking age and how it would actually help society to lower the age because less people would be proned to wanting to break the law.  Society has taught teenagers that drinking is a fun and good thing and that if you want your "identity" to be a "somebody," you must do it.  In our third big assignment, we did a multimedia project on the cafeteria foods at Clemson University.  The foods here today are not very appetizing.  Being in the south, we love to eat.  We love some good old southern cooking.  This is our culture.  When we are fed unsatisfying, fake food over and over, our stomachs can't seem to continue taking much more of it.  Culture, identity, and society make each and every person exactly who they are today and through the many assignments in this class, I have been able to see how they are connected to our everyday lives.

Pg. 210

1.  The format of our presentation with be purely oral with videos and pictures that we will discuss.

2. Our audience is the students in our english class.  Pretty much all of them have been to the dining halls before so they are familiar with the taste and unhealthiness of the food served there.  I believe that the audience will agree with our opinions and the whole thesis of our presentation since it is directly affecting them.

3. The purpose of our presentation is to hopefully get a point across and stir up enough people that want to do something about changing the food in the cafeterias.

4. Our branch of oratory is deliberative or legislative discourse... it is designed to argue a position.

5. I want to convey somewhat of a concerned persona to my audience.  I visualize myself as a presenter speaking for the student body on how the food is unhealthy and bad and there needs to be something done.

6. I want to use a serious but somewhat funny tone.  It's on the unhealthiness of the food so we are trying to get our point across but it needs to be somewhat fun and we will use humor to keep the audience's attention.

7. I plan to use photographs and videos of interviews in my presentation to support my thesis.

Pg 219

1. For the format of our presentation, we will be using a mix between a photo essay and a video to show pictures and reactions of people as well as interviews with students and/or faculty in the cafeterias.

2. We will use windows movie maker to show the videos and interviews that we take with our digital video camera.

3.  Potential outline:

- Discuss the unhealthiness of certain foods

- Discuss how the dining hall food is unhealthy

- Talk about the students and faculty and their opinions on the food

- Talk about some things that can be changed to make the food better

At a glance pg 174 - Revising my research paper

When revising my research paper, the first thing i did was read it aloud.  This made it easier to pick out my mistakes because I could hear what I was saying rather than just reading it silently. As I was revising my paper, I was able to detect some run-on sentences that didn't sound as well and I also repeated myself a good bit throughout the paper.  I used feedback that some of my peers gave me to help better my paper.  My conclusion was definitely shortest in my paper just because I was tired and wrapping everything up but when revising, I was able to go back and make sure that the conclusion was one of my strongest paragraphs so that my paper ended on a high note.  I also caught a lot of silly mistakes that I had made when I was reviewing my paper.  Several times, I had left out commas or made silly grammatical errors that I didn't realize when writing the paper.  Altogether, after some of the feedback I have received and from self-editing my paper after a few days has passed, I already feel like my paper is much better.

Research paper Outline

Katie Sharpe

Research Paper Outline

March 3, 2009

Professor Amy Jessee

Lowering the Drinking Age to Eighteen

I.                    I.  Introduction

A.     “Hook” line

B.     Background

C.     Thesis:  The drinking age should be lowered to eighteen due to the fact that it would decrease the number of college-aged students who drink just in spite of the law.

II.             II.  Why is the drinking age 21?

     A.  What makes society see a 21-year-old as mature and an adult?

     B.  Other countries’ drinking ages

III.  Benefits of lowering the drinking age

            A.  Statistics on why drinking-age laws are ineffective

            B.  Help lower the crime level

IV.  How to go about changing the law

            A.  Reactions of other people to lowering the drinking age

            B.  Steps to take in order to lower the drinking age

V.  Conclusion

            A.  Restatement of thesis

            B.  Quick look back

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a crime.  It is the stealing of someone else's words and making them your own.  The reason this is wrong is because if it were legal, then we would have a society that used the words nothing but the words of other people in their speeches and papers.  The concept of originality and creativity would be almost non-existent.  I'll be honest here, if plagiarism were allowed, I probably wouldn't write half of my papers.  I would do a lot of copy and pasting.  Because this is a crime, it causes people to expand their thinking skills and rephrase citations in ways to make them their own.

TIME magazine cover freewrite

I chose to write about the cover of the polar bear standing on the little bit of ice that is left.  It appeals to all people because it makes you feel sad for the polar bear.  With all the ice melting, he will have no where to live and will die.  I feel this is a good cover to get across the point of global warming because it makes you want to stop and do something about it.  Inside the magazine, there are a bunch of articles on global warming and how we people can help prevent it.