Cover Letter
Whilst brainstorming for phase 1’s assignment, I often found myself questioning the whole purpose behind incorporating rhetoric within one’s piece of writing. I have always found it troublesome to fully comprehend the compositional techniques that are required when it comes to free writing a personal narrative. However, with the conclusion of the first phase of this English Composition class, I can safely say that I have successfully grown to understand the application of persuasion into my own narrative, for better comprehension by the audience who I aimed to write for. From learning how to set the rhetorical situation of my personal narrative, to providing the context behind it, I was able to tailor my choices of language in order to appropriately convey the overall idea that I had in mind. With this, I was able to successfully portray how traumatic experiences can wound the capabilities of an individual, such as their inability of expressing personal speech/dialect.
Evidently enough, the audience that I targeted with my personal narrative was those affected by personal tragedies within their lives, that have left their personal sense of judgement and expression impaired within the outside world. With coming to write about my own struggles and hardships in the wake of a personal tragedy, I envisioned to write in a manner that would seem to sympathize with those that still continue to possess the very lack of self expression that I once had myself. And so, I took this assignment head on by writing about the burdens that weighed down upon me in such a time of trouble, so that my audience can grow to appeal with my experiences and fully understand how I overcame the very struggles that followed within my path.
Other than learning how to include a rhetorical situation within my writing, I have also come to acquire many other meaningful insights within this phase, in regards to language and literacy. Amongst the multitude of different concepts and terms introduced within this assignment period, I have found myself resonating with writing practices such as providing the exigence behind the writing piece itself, as well as the evidence behind the ideas I wished to express. Going back to my first time in brainstorming about this assignment, I wished to truly write a piece that envisioned an experience that I felt worthy enough of being told to the outside world. And so, with that, I decided to write about a certain event that would captivate the audience for how traumatic the experience itself had been, in the hopes of establishing a sense of sympathy for myself and for others that shared an encounter as similar as mine.
As a result, I believe that my piece of work comes to showcase an effective achievement of “exploring and analyzing a variety of genres and rhetorical situations within writing”, a Course Learning Outcome that I’ve targeted since the beginning of this semester. After completing multiple rhetorical situation handouts on pieces written by renowned authors such as Safwat Saleem and Amy Tang, I’ve come to understand how authors tend to uniquely target their own audience in different ways, through effectively persuading a stronger comprehension of their situation at hand, to a great extent.
