Ulenna Gonzales

Professor Shuv Rana Bhat

Introductory Composition: Writing as Inquiry 080

4 December 2023

Critical Reflection

The things that I learned from this course came from our discussion posts. I learned about

Multimodality, rhetorical tradition, discourse communities, logos, ethos, pathos, and how

pictures and words convey meaning. The ones that stuck out to me the most through our

discussion posts would be discourse communities and how words and pictures convey meaning. I

could understand what the author was trying to say in those two discussions more than the

others! Also, I would say that I am satisfied with the way that I wrote about discourse

communities and rhetorical traditions because I went more in-depth with those topics, I

understood the concept and was able to take the words out of the author’s mouth and form it into

my own.

Even though the discussion posts went well, I did not like a few things about them. The

first thing I did not like was that some of the articles were a little too wordy and that the author’s

vocabulary was way above mine. I feel like the author could have used better words that were

not as complex and that would have gotten the same point across. The way that some of the

articles were super complex felt like they were not for me to read. It took me a few times to read

the article and then form my discussion post because I could not grasp what the author was

trying to say the first time. Secondly, I feel like the discussion posts were not that necessary. The

class could have learned the same topics without the thoughts of the authors. Something that we
could have done instead was watch an interesting video about the topic that was informative or

that had good examples.

Although the discussion posts were not my favorite, they did help me change my thinking

and my writing. Especially with rhetorical tradition and ethos, logos, and pathos. Those topics

taught me that it is important to know my audience. The more I know my audience I can shape

my writing in a way that the audience will better perceive it. There can be negative responses to

my writing if I do not consider who the audience is.

When it came to the papers, I was satisfied with how I did. I did not think there was very

much that I could improve on. There were some grammatical errors but that was about the only

thing. As I stated previously, the things that stuck with me the most would be our discussion

about discourse communities and the article about how pictures and words convey meaning

differently. One more thing that also stuck with me was the video about Chimamanda Ngozi

Adichie. I remember it was about the danger of a single story and I enjoyed that video and the

paper we wrote along with it which was the rhetorical analysis.

Thank you, Professor Shuv, for everything you did this semester! I appreciate you being

very flexible and understanding with my schedule. I like the teaching style that you have with the

class, and I also like your humor and that you are always cracking jokes. Thank you for taking

the time to introduce us at the beginning of the semester! I liked that. I hope you have a great

spring semester. Happy Holidays!