Running Head: NEVER ENDING STORY 1

The Story Behind a Family Never Ends

Brianna Mclaurin

University of North Carolina Charlotte

NEVER ENDING STORY 2

The Story Behind a Family Never Ends

Using rhetorical knowledge to “identify and apply strategies across a range of texts and

writing assignments” has given me the opportunity to ask more questions and receive more

answers. This experience has made it easier to understand the process of writing and how the

genre, purpose, audience and context shapes all writing. Through the completion of several

assignments, I have come to the realization that I have always been using rhetorical knowledge

without knowing it.

Having to come up with an inquiry question seemed like it would be difficult at first.

After getting a complete understanding of how far I could go with this project it became easy.

The point of the inquiry question in this project is to push the researcher, myself, to find out

something more than just what lies on the surface and is easy to access. In order to create my

inquiry question, I needed information. I was forced to complete interviews that I had no idea

would be so successful. Writing Prompt five, as pointless as it may seem to my further research,

led me to look deeper into the life my grandmother experienced and why she experienced it. In

this Writing Prompt I had to elaborate on where my name came from and since my middle name

came from my grandmother, she was the start to the formulation of my inquiry question. The

purpose behind this prompt is what led me into my deeper research.

Gathering information, so far, has not been too hard for me. Once it is time to put all of

this information where it belongs, I feel challenged. Trying to organize several stories from

several people can be overwhelming. In order to organize the information in a scholarly way, it

was necessary to rely on the ways I responded to the assigned prompts and other writing

assignments. The same techniques used to complete those assignments, rhetorical knowledge
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concepts, are the same concepts that will be used to complete the remainder of my genealogy

project.