Rhetorical Analysis - Portfolio Draft Reflection

Because of a time constraint, I was instructed to mainly focus on tackling parts of the

paper that were lacking in content according to the graded rubric I received. Upon reading the

rubric, it became clear to me how most of my analysis lacked support from the text. I made the

mistake of assuming that the audience was an expert in the text I analyzed, just how I am an

expert in it. After reading the text so many times, certain things became obvious to me, so at the

time it did not feel necessary to refer back to it in my paper, which is why my revision mainly

consists of adding sections of support to my paper.

The first issue I encountered when reading back my paper was that it was not clear who

the text's audience was. Although I specify it later on in the paper, I did not specify it in the

section where I had to, which was "Introduction to the Community". I added a paragraph about it

at the end to reiterate who the text was meant to be for. Because this section was the opening of

my paper, it was necessary to explicitly state the audience to avoid any confusion when breaking

down topics later on in the paper, so I added this section to clarify this from the beginning, that

way whoever reads the paper is aware of that.

I corrected the next two sections for the same reason: they lacked support. I noticed I lost

a substantial amount of points in the rubric, and looking back I understand why. Although I

know what I meant when I made the claims I did, I had no explicit support of it. All I had were

vague references to the text and no direct quotations or summaries. I then proceeded to add

references to two texts: the first one being the article by Higgens that helped me understand the

effect of ethos pathos, and logos better, and the second one being the text I was analyzing. The

inclusion of the Higgens text helped emphasize why ethos, pathos, and logos work in building an

argument.
 Finally, the inclusion of the text I analyzed helped support my claims about it. I believe

that with explicit references to parts of the text helped build my own credibility, and it helped

make my paper overall clearer.