Remembering Rhetoric

How do you remember all that you forgot? The process is extremely long and excrutiatingly painful. Actually, I'm beginning to remember how I went about writing these papers in high school: the long nights, the billions of times I pressed backspace on my keyboard, the cutting and pasting, the frustration, the madness....yes, its all slowly coming back to me. I can't say I've actually missed it, but I think its going to be interesting to see how my writing has changed. Assuming, of course, that I recall everything I learned. But "Thank you for Arguing" is certainly helping me a lot.

Sometimes I wonder if I learn more from the humorous examples the author provides, or from the actual description of various techniques. I think its hard to say. Everything just sort of sticks in your mind. Plus, I never really knew that there was so much to rhetoric to begin with! You would think that its just analyzing a few things, nothing major. Boy, would you be wrong. But the book doesn't make it seem as if rhetoric itself is extremely difficult. It just makes it seem as if, with practice, it'll come to you. Quite reassuring... and deceptive? Only time will tell.

Furthermore, the "Writing about movies" reading also helped a lot as well. It explained how to go about analyzing a scene from a movie, what to take notes about, what to pay attention to, stuff like that. And I really liked the different examples about the different types of essays that can be written about movies. It was after reading the examples that I finally figured out how to go about writing this rhetorical analysis. Otherwise, I was extremely lost. Now, I'm just a tad bit lost. Which, in my perspective, is a major improvement from where I was a few days ago. After reading all of the readings we were supposed to read, and doing some research online, I finally got enough guts to start writing this essay.