Justin Scrivens

April 22, 2021

ENC 1101
Self-Assessment
I feel that the through the assignments and readings given during the duration of the
semester, I have successfully all learning outcomes. While the readings were helpful to inform us
on how to use the concepts need to complete the course outcomes, it was the assignments that
made me find out when and how to apply the concepts to different situations, that fully
completed my understanding of the topic, and thus helping me to achieve the outcomes. The first
topic we discussed in the course were sponsors of literacy. In the passage, “Sponsors of
Literacy”, the author Deborah Brant explained, “The concept of sponsors helps to explain, then,
a range of human relationships and ideological pressures that turn up at the scenes of literacy
learning—from benign sharing between adults and youths, to euphemized coercions in schools
and workplaces, to the most notorious impositions and deprivations by church or state." This
help expand my understanding of what sponsors are, and that sponsors are just people that give
others money to help sell a product. The article showed me that a sponsor is a person or group
who uses other people's or group's (the sponsored) influences to spread and idea or product. This
means that just about everyone is a sponsor in some ways, and my literary sponsors is are all of
the people that have changed the way I speak. This understanding helped me to achieve outcome
2: Students will engage in a recursive, inquiry-based writing and research process that is
meaningful for a specific community, because it showed me the different ways because I
analyzed the influences that have affected the different ways I write and speak in different
situations.
Next in the course we discussed how when composing an argument about a topic, you are
essentially joining an ongoing conversation. In his article, "Argument as a Conversation: The
Role of Inquiry in Research and Writing a Researched Argument", Stuart Greene explained,
“Like the verbal conversation you have with others, effective arguments never take place in a
vacuum; they take into account previous conversations that have taken place about the subject
under discussion. Seeing research as a means for advancing a conversation makes the research
process more real, especially if you recognize that you will need to support your claims with
evidence in order to persuade the readers to agree with you.” What Greene meant by this is that
when you write and compose arguments, you are most likely arguing something that has
previously been argued before, therefore you can use the findings and information that those that
have argued this before you to support your own argument.
Next, we learn about a similar but different concept used by writers, the Rogerian mode
of argumentation. This method of argumentation is meant to take the stress and hostility away
from arguing. Carl Rogers explained that when two people argue, it escalates and becomes a
battle of pride, and to be wrong would mean defeat. To solve this, he suggests instead of arguing
each both people should present their argument to a third party, just as lawyers present their case
to a judge and not each other. In the assignment for this topic, we were asked how we plan to
apply this method of argumentation to our research papers, and the way I applied it was when
presenting my argument, I tried not to make it as to disagree with someone, but to inform a third
party.
Another outcome we discussed in class was “What is Rhetoric”. To gain a better
understanding of the topic I read the article, “"Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning
Making” by Doug Downs. In the article Downs discussed the meaning of rhetoric as well as the
various ways it is used.  He stated, "The term rhetoric is like gravity - a set of principles that
explains and predicts how chunks of matter interact. (Remember newtons laws of gravity?) But
gravity also refers to that interaction itself the universal condition ("force") in which matter is
attracted to other matter." He used this metaphor to demonstrate the vastness of the word
rhetoric, and that a simple definition would not be enough to describe it. To demonstrate our
understanding were where asked how we could use rhetoric in our future careers. I responded by
explaining that engineering is a collaborative field and that in order to work engineers need to be
able to clear present their ideas and objective to the other engineers.
One of the biggest ideas we discussed was, “What is intertextuality”. After reading
James porter’s article, “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” I was able to answer that
question. I found that intertextuality was the connection between an article and all the articles
that came before it. This was very closely related to a previously discussed topic, arguing as a
conversation. The notion that Stuart was describing in his article (“Argument as a Conversation”)
was that when someone begins arguing, they must first become familiar with what part of that
topic has already been argued because they are not starting an argument but rather joining an
existing one. The concept of intertextuality is like the aforementioned concept except it all of our
writing is built upon the writings of others not just our arguments.