Reflection

In my rhetorical analysis, I had a very basic rough draft. It was only a page and a half. In my first attempt I put too much of my own feelings and ideas into the paper. After the meeting with the professor, I understood more of what the paper was supposed to be. Rather than an opinion or editorial, it was more like a book report, though not in the same style and meaning. The information was on the subject, not improving or countering the ideas of the author. In my final paper, I was able to get the three pages needed. I was able to expand my paper by using more of the author’s words, though, some of my citations were not correct. In some spots I had multiple citations for a single page, and was unsure how to cite them, so I put the page number after each time, rather than, I assume, at the end of the paper. There were other places in the paper where I put the citation in the paragraph. I thought you were supposed to put them at the end of the sentence, but I must have been mistaken. Something else that I need to work on heavily is my transitions. I never have had much skill at doing them, often times I’ll repeat the same one throughout the paper. This is just something that takes time and practice to get well at. There were a few spots were I didn’t have the quotes right in the paper, though with one spot, he has said not to put the punctuation inside the quotes unless that is how it was. So I put the period after the quotations because it wasn’t included in the quote and I was marked off for it. There were a few typos in the paper, and some use of words that weren’t needed, or were incorrectly used. After speaking to Nick, it made a lot more sense to me how to write this paper, same with the next one. I mostly need to be more confident with my own writing skill, and try to turn out the best rough draft I can in order to have an easier time doing the final copy. I usually am better at churning out a good final copy without the use of a good rough draft, since in High School I was trained to use the outline more than the rough draft. Overall, I think this rough draft, and the commentary that went with it, helped me very much understand how to get the final paper into the best condition I could, at the time. I think if I had put a little more effort into reading over what I was putting into it, and what editing and citations I needed to do, I could have polished the paper into a much better one that I had turned in. I hope to use this improved knowledge with Synthesis paper that is due on Friday, and get a better score on it than I received on the rhetorical analysis.

Synthesis

Both of these papers were very well written. It’s amazing to see how the truths people cling to are hardly actually discovered for themselves. Both Plato and Freire discuss how it is people know what they know, and how people become educated. Freire uses analogies, while Plato uses an example of how people first learn.

Freire compared a teacher and the students to containers. The teacher’s task was to fill the students with his lectures, while the students retain all that they can, without really understanding the reasons behind the words. He believes that humans best learn by figuring out on their own, reading deeper into things.

Plato’s example was people living in a cave discovering things about them and trying to figure out what those things are. One example was an echo with shadows. How would the people know that the echo is just sound waves being bounced back off the walls of the cave? By agreeing as a group on what the shadows and sounds were, they understood more of what was around them.