Literacy Narrative and What's Relative

      This week in the overflowing fountain of knowledge for a class called Composition, we have started our long journey of constant revisions, not that I'm complaining, for writing a simple literacy narrative. To the average audience, writing a paper that might be only two pages long shouldn't take very long at all, but for people who have known how it is to be the author you know how much longer it takes. The easier part is getting the first ideas and composing them into a rough draft. The harder part is getting those ideas to flow, make sense, relate to the audience, and accomplish your purposes for your audience.
      First of all the narrative, a narrative is a story where you narrate a paper that gives a story from your past that relates to a point that you are trying to explain using that paper. For example, if you wanna make a point about giving a speech, then you would tell a story, could be embarrassing, about you giving a speech and how it has affected you positively or negatively depending on what point your trying to make. in this case our point has to do with literacy, thus giving us the literacy narrative. To put it all together, we had to write a paper about a story in our past that deals with literacy, like first learning to read or write and things like that.
      So I wrote a literacy narrative, but, to my surprise, we are also learning how to become "writing tutors" in the class. Being a writing tutor, and yes i will be saying tutor quite frequently so get your laughs out now, is reading over someones paper and focusing on their Higher Order Concerns, or the harder part mentioned before in the first paragraph, and not the Lower Order Concerns, like grammar and spelling. After writing the rough draft, we were supposed to exchange papers and become writing tutors for each other in the class. So on the bottom i have my rough draft for you . I had mixed reviews not really any horrible ones but my third paragraph was considered "cheesy", and there was some fighting going on in the class, chairs being thrown and tables being flipped, computers smashed and pretty much whatever else happens in an all out brawl of epic proportions (unfortunately I over exaggerated to the extreme about the fighting going on in the class room). I revised my paper and then had it checked by the teach, and am currently writing the second revision of which I'm certain there will be more then just two.
      The writing process is definitely this long drawn out process of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, and this time i am complaining, but it will probably be extremely better in the end. I'll post the final draft so you can see the difference.
     
      My rough draft

Rhetorical: A Missunderstood Word

     The word rhetorical or rhetoric is used quite often in everyday language especially in the phrase "it's a rhetorical question." The interesting thing is rhetorical, used in this context, is actually being used correctly, but most people misunderstand why it is being used in the first place.
     As a composition student, I have been learning a lot about writing and what's involved with it like the writing process, but then we started to learn about the "rhetorical situation"and how much it is actually used in writing. The thing is rhetoric means using language effectively to pursuade, inform, educate, or entertain, and the rhetorical situation means the circumstances in which you communicate. This means that the word rhetoric simply is using language to your advantage like changing the views or thoughts about a subject of a person or persons.

     The truth is, before taking this class, I couldn't tell you what the word rhetoric means, or the fact that rhetoric was even a word. Now i think that the word is stinkin' sweet, and I can go to all my friends saying things like, "did you know rhetoric is a word and it is used commonly in writing and speaking, and it means blah blah blah." It's really cool to sound smart I definitley recommend trying it sometime, but there is more to it than just the word rhetoric. The whole rhetorical situation that writers use consists of parts that make the whole. The whole is the context or the backround of the author while the parts are the audience, the purpose, and the genre. The writer has to consider all these subjects when writing. It's not an easy thing, but I'm sure it gets better, well that's what I'm hoping.