Roxanne Hummel

ENC 2135

Jackie Farley

4/16/24

Rhetorical Analysis

When I first enrolled in ENC-2135, I did not have anything in specific,, regarding what I

would learn, what I would write, and how I would interact with writing composition. Yes, I had

heard from friends about some of the projects and the amount of homework they had to do for

the class, but I did not realize how much I would actually come to enjoy this class! To my

surprise, I was able to do my projects about topics that I was deeply interested or personally

invested in, such as the Stanley Cup Craze in Project 1, queer artists in Project 2, and endangered

sawfish in Project 3. Overall, the main thing that I learned in this course is how different genres

can have different constraints and advantages from each other when trying to get across a point.

In Project 1, I used both academic research and popular news media as sources for my

paper. Obviously, these two genres are catered to vastly different audiences and therefore are

composed differently, but it is very interesting to see how academic research can actually back

up (or maybe refute) claims proposed by popular news sites. While they are both very different

sources of information, they have a surprisingly large amount of interlap, which was explored

within Project 1.

In Project 2, I compared two different genres of art portrayed using two entirely different

mediums: poetry and music. It was very interesting to investigate the constraints that poetry has
that music does not and vice versa. There are so many other kinds of constraints that may not

have properly thought of had I not explored these genres for Project 2, constraints such as the

fact that music is ephemeral- it is not able to be experienced “wholey.“ In other words, music

must be experienced piece by piece, bit by bit- it cannot be experienced all at once. This concept

is more abstract, and it was a concept that I was able to properly develop when comparing the

artifacts’ effectiveness in spreading their message.

Lastly, I did the most exploration about the constraints and differences in genre and

medium in Project 3, where I created 3 different texts with the same exigence, that being

spreading information on how to save and protect endangered sawfish which have been turning

up sick and dead on Florida beaches. I had both received and written many emails before,

however, I have never sent an email with the intention of it being a “mass-send” email, meaning

that it is sent to a large amount of people. In the past, I had only really written emails to one or

two people knowing that the receivers would be certain to respond. For the mass-send email

regarding the sawfish conservation, I had to utilize different formatting and language to try and

entice people into reading the email (or at least glance at it before deleting it immediately). This

was something that I had never done before, which made it especially difficult compared to the

Instagram meme and poster- two genres which I have made many of in the past.

Overall, I learned a lot in ENC-2135, though I specifically learned a lot about how genre

and medium constraints and advantages can lead to different interactions with these genres.

Different genres of text require different compositions and different approaches.