As I look through my TOWs, I do not notice much change in my analysis at first glance. I have maintained much the same style over the course of the year. The primary change at first glance is that I stopped caring about word limits and wrote as much as I felt like writing (always over the limit). However, upon inspection, I think it is clear that my writing has improved over the course of the year.
Whether or not the TOWs themselves shaped my rhetorical analysis writing skills, or whether that could be attributed more heavily to writing we did in class and for take-home essays, I do not know. I believe that especially by the end of the year, the TOWs had become a showcase for what I had learned over the course of the year, not so much practice, as they became a chore and I stopped caring how deeply I analyzed the texts I chose. Thus, as I analyze my progress, I am keeping in mind that the first half of the year displays my rigorous effort to write good rhetorical analyses, whereas the second half of the year displays what I came to be able to do with very little effort.
Taking a look at my TOWs from the beginning of the year, I generally stated the obvious, such as in this summer reading TOW: “James bolsters his thesis with historical and literary evidence, allowing him achieve his purpose.” Looking back, I can say that of course he was using evidence to achieve his purpose, but how was he using it? Another problem with my early TOWs was that I blatantly use terms relating to rhetoric simply for the sake of proving I knew them. Now I know that is not always necessary, and if more time is spent on determining the effect than the specific term name, the rhetorical analysis will be much better.
By the end of the year I was generally spending fifteen to twenty minutes on a TOW, as opposed to the hour or more I spent per TOW at the beginning of the year. Yet, my rhetorical analysis was still better, which I think shows my progress as a result of the writing we have done this year (TOWs and otherwise). While at the beginning of the year I stated the obvious, by March I was identifying that the writer of a memoir I read uses a stream-of-consciousness approach to writing to show the public his humanity in order to hold their respect for being both the idealist American “common man” and an American war hero.
I see this change in analysis as profound. While before I struggled to even identify rhetorical strategies, by the end of the year I could pick out much better ones - with less effort on top of that! One thing I obviously could still work on is being concise. In general, everything I write uses too many unnecessary words, this reflection included. I guess I will have to tackle that obstacle in the coming years, though believe it or not, I have improved significantly since the start of high school!
I would like to say thank you to Mr. Yost and Ms. Pronko for helping me to improve my writing. As much as I dreaded Sundays, the time just might have been well spent (though I do not really want to admit it).
