Duquesnel 1

Michael Duquesnel
Professor Lindsey
College Writing
4 December 2019

Reflective Project

In terms of how much has changed in my writing since the beginning of the year, I would

argue that it is a bit more than I initially think. My actual writing itself hasn’t changed but the

way I think about it has. In my overall experience of writing, I have mostly viewed writing from

a big-picture view. When I would write something academic, I had a goal that I sought to

accomplish through my work. Now that I have gone through College Writing, I now view

writing from more of a statistical and analytical process. Things like the rhetorical situation,

discourse ethnography, and video, “Everything is Remix” have changed the way in which I view

writing as a discipline.

The rhetorical situation paper was a very interesting time here in this class. Upon an

initial reading of the article “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” by Keith Grant-

Davie, I was so incredibly confused about what this concept was trying to communicate. It

wasn’t until our in-class discussion that I was able to firmly grasp each part of the rhetorical

situation. The parts of the rhetorical situation that changed my view of writing the most were

exigence and audience. Whenever I had written in the past, both academic and for my own

personal enjoyment, I had only considered the points in which I was trying to convey. The

purpose of my writing was always to make a point that I wanted to convey. Since I have started

to consider the audience’s perspective and why exactly I need to communicate with the audience,

it has truly evolved my writing for the better.

These same principles started to become stronger when I completed my discourse

ethnography project. The discourse community that I chose was my high school’s drama club, an
 Duquesnel 2

organization that I am incredibly familiar with. To be able to apply the principles of the

rhetorical analysis made the concept a little more real to me. This especially helped me to

understand advertising a little better. When I think of creating an advertisement, I create

something that I would want to look at. Why would I advertise something that I myself do not

like? Well, advertising would be better with both the audience and exigence in mind. This could

increase both the outreach of the advertisement and also how effective the advertisement would

be.

The pinnacle and also my favorite part of this class was when we watched the

“Everything is Remix” video and had a discussion about it. Now, I am a huge fan of film theory

and enjoy watching video essays on the subject on a regular basis. This video felt like a video

that I would watch in my free time, which made me even more excited to talk about. The thesis

of the video was that everything that we create now will always just be a remix of something that

we have seen in the past. They then went on to make a list of examples to prove this point. After

the discussion, I have become more aware of my own personal writing and how it stems from

other things. I have never been a creative type, but when I do come up with an idea in my head, I

now am starting to realize where I get different aspects of the idea from.

Overall, my writing has changed considerably since the beginning of the semester. The

dissection of writing that we have done over the course of the class has made me more aware of

why and how I write the way I do. Although I can never go back to being ignorant and will be

aware of these things forever now, I believe that it will help fine-tune my writing and allow me

to continue increasing in my own writing ability.