Core Value 1. My work demonstrates that I used a variety of social and interactive practices that involve recursive stages of exploration, discovery, conceptualization, and development.

Coming into Composition 2, I had never had much experience with receiving feedback and having a conversation. Through many of my assignments I was able to see the deeper analysis of my work, especially in the Stone Money post. This was my first encounter with lots of meaningful feedback and was a lot to take in, but I was able to see my work from a different point of view and respond to the feedback. Previously I was not able to actually respond and really see how conversive feedback worked. I used this process in my other assignments, responding when given feedback and trying to work with it the best I could. I was able to implement other ideas into my own work, seeing how I could manipulate them into my own. 

Core Value 2. My work demonstrates that I read critically, and that I placed texts into conversation with one another to create meaning by synthesizing ideas from various discourse communities. 

The counterintuitive work done in this class has resulted in much more critical thinking and research on the students part. In class, using ideas said out loud was something I would interpret into my own words and then would use them in my own writing. In the ​​Safer Saws assignment, we were required to read many sources from different perspectives to achieve multiple analysis’. This was something I had never done before, so I was able to do more in depth work on this to make sure I got it done well. I was able to find how ideas from these multiple perspectives, usually opposing, came together to have a similar process in finding their own opinions. Using these perspectives, I dug into the different claims to really see what the people meant. 

Core Value 3. My work demonstrates that I rhetorically analyzed the purpose, audience, and contexts of my own writing and other texts and visual arguments.

Finding the purpose in a video or text is hard to do if you don’t look close enough. That is something I originally struggled with especially in my Visual Rhetoric assignment. In the blink of an eye, something meaningful can be missed in a video. A 30 second video may seem short, but missing something can happen much more frequently than I thought. Knowing the intent of the video made it a little easier to understand some of the purpose behind the video, but watching the small clips over and over again made the intent and context much clearer. Not only was I able to look back at my original analysis of the video, but I analyzed that to make it much better. I saw purpose in every second and recognized how the little things mattered for the audience. 

Core Value 4: My work demonstrates that I have met the expectations of academic writing by locating, evaluating, and incorporating illustrations and evidence to support my own ideas and interpretations.

Researching one topic can be hard to do with the overwhelming amount of resources to dig through, but using them properly is harder. I was able to find sources that I evaluated to the point of no return. When researching for my Definition Argument I had to really dive into what music is. In my writing I incorporated research of what music can be defined as into my own writing, which analyzed what people really thought music was and what it is after you scratch the surface. I built my own argument off of the evidence found in other sources, finding one true meaning of what I had been looking for.

Core Value 5. My work demonstrates that I respect my ethical responsibility to represent complex ideas fairly and to the sources of my information with appropriate citation. 

Respecting sources that are used in my work is a big thing for me personally. My Annotated Bibliography shows the true intent of my use of the sources I found and what they are all about. This combination of sources used in my short arguments and sources that I found useful in the research process are presented here. In all my work, I cited quotations and ideas that I thought were meaningful, giving the authors rightful ownership to their hard work. I used 10 sources overall, enriching myself in many perspectives and data found in each source. Each provided very complex and counterintuitive ideas that I was able to present in my own arguments along with my own ideas.