I felt that my main strength in this project was centered on my prewriting the linguistic

aspect of the argument. English 103 has allowed me to hone and expand upon my organizational

and writing skills in order to communicate my argument and perspective into a coherent and

well-structured essay. I felt that this was my best strength due to the fact that it is the aspect of

this project that I was the most familiar with and had practiced for the entirety of the semester. I

also felt that my diction and use of language have been a strength throughout all of my essay that

have helped me to communicate my point clearly.

As I stated before, I feel comfortable with forming the linguistic argument and would

even go as far to say I excel at it, but the multimodal argument posed more of a challenge.

Although I would like to think of myself as creative, I often become overwhelmed and stressed

by the pressure of being creative enough. As I am not educated on any of the criteria of music

creation and production and I was unable to offer any art through a physical medium, so I

produced a PowerPoint/YouTube video where I spoke my argument and provided my evidence

through visually showing the advertisement I was critiquing. I can honestly say that I have never

been asked to create a YouTube video (or an artistic/musical rendition of my essay), but I feel

that it will help me to expand my understanding of how information and claims can be

transmitted to an audience and that essays are not the only way of conveying an argument.

I genuinely hope that I satisfactorily communicated my argument on the subject matter

and addressed the societally damaging messages expressed in the Budweiser advertisement,

“Born the Hard Way.” I had initially not recognized the negative aspects of the commercial and

perceived it as an uplifting message that gave a nod to the hard work of American immigrants,

but through the lens of Marxism I was able to identify the repressive aspects of capitalism and

classism that the commercial is almost promoting. I hope to bring attention to these concepts and
suggest changes that would prevent discrimination and repression disguised as the American

dream.