This year I have learned the importance of the audience. Writing in high school, I was only writing for my teacher or a person that was already pre-determined for me. However, this class has taught me to think about my audience. This has completely changed the way that I write, because now I am not concerned about sounding sophisticated for a better grade, but I am more concerned about whether my style of writing will suit the kind of audience that I am trying to appeal to. Genre is another important rhetoric device that I have learned. Genre is a way for me to deliver my message to my audience in the most effective way possible. I cannot talk about stopping Asian hate crimes through a memo to my four co-workers. Something like a personal essay piece or a potential letter to a congresswoman are effective mediums to get the message across. Engaging in the collaboration such as peer reviews were also something that I found to be effective. Some of my classmates that helped with the review were the exact kind of audience that I was attempting to appeal to, so when they give me feedback on my writing, it allows me to have a look into what my audience thinks of my work. The peer review meant a lot to how I was able to approach my writings since I was now able to see an example of how my audience would react to my work. Locating research sources in our library database was an effective skill I have learned throughout the course as well. Finding credible sources on the internet nowadays is hard considering most of the results that come up are based on the popularity of the source, which can lead to major bias. Learning how to locate academic journals was also a very important skill. I am sure that even though I am on the engineering track, that I will be taking a few more writing classes and as an aspiring engineer, I need to be able to read academic journal articles in order to further broaden my knowledge of computer science. All these skills were meaningful to me because these are skills I will utilize for the rest of my life. I will always consider my audience when I am writing or talking about a certain topic that I am interested in, I will always try to include my peers in the review process of my works, and I now have a new understanding of pinpointing the biases in articles that I read everyday and I now have a basic understanding of how academic journal articles are written, something that I have no doubt will help me in my career of computer science.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.