Funeral Business Reflection

Improved Essays
Taking a Look Back “What exactly is your controlling purpose?” I got asked this question so many times by my peers, my instructor, and even the tutors at the writing center to the point where it got frustrating to try and explain. Then I realized, my controlling purposes for all three of my interpretive essays were vague and confusing for my audience to understand. Because of my controlling purposes being confusing, the rest of my paper subsequently wasn’t coherent for my audience. But, the revision period came at the perfect time to begin revisions on my essays. Throughout this reflective project, I would like to touch on several things. I would like to reflect on choices I made throughout my essays and how they related to my rhetoric situation, the way my writing was influenced by the social nature as well as the collaborative process, and lastly how my writing works ethically to respond to others. There are many choices that I made throughout my essays. These choices I made related to my rhetoric situation. They are also affected by my purpose, audience, and context. A major choice I made in my first essay was to explain why Hingston would describe the economic stand point of cremation vs. a burial method. I said, “But, why does Hingston give us these facts first as opposed to the religion portion or the technology portion in her article? I think she made this choice in her article because people are trying to save as much money as possible, and by putting facts about this right out of the gate about how cremation is much cheaper than a normal funeral, she lures in an audience that maybe she wouldn’t entice if she lead off about how much technology has affected the funeral business” (2). I made this decision to incorporate Hingston’s decision making. I also put this in my essay to explain why her decision would matter to the audience. Other choices I got to make were the words I used. In the beginning of the course, I told my instructor I wanted to work on my word choice. I wanted to learn how to effectively convey my opinions for my audience. I feel as though these essays we’ve written have given me good practice and have allowed me to develop a larger vocabulary. Throughout the course, one of our main goals was to communicate to an audience and relate our essays to them. For me, this goal was hard to accomplish because I have never really written anything for another audience to view. I wrote a lot of research papers in high school, so I have never got experience writing for an audience. However, I do have a couple of examples where I tried to communicate with my audience. In my second essay, I interpreted Rushkoff’s Time Ain’t Money and made some strides towards communicating to my audience. I said, “. But why would Rushkoff refer so much to the past in this section? Is it because he believes that the past was superior to what is now present? Does he believe we are going in the right direction?” (2). I asked my audience these questions to my audience to get their attention and get them thinking. I used this tactic a few times in my essays to try and communicate with my audience and get them involved with my writing. A big …show more content…
Reading a text, analyzing it, and then developing conclusions about it, is a difficult process. This course really made me read something and break it down into smaller fragments. As I read now, I find myself analyzing everything and digging deeper into topics I wouldn’t normally dig into. Many of the texts we read could be interoperated in several different ways. I stated this idea in The Death of the Funeral Business essay I completed. I said, “Hingston may be trying to prove how a decline in religion affiliation might be leading to an increase in cremation? Without a religion, is it easier to make decisions about how your death is handled? Hingston may be saying that cremation is much simpler for the living and the dead. Is she pointing out the economic decision of being cremated over a normal funeral? All of these questions could be answers” (3). A reader could interoperate Hingston’s text in the ways I stated, it just depends on how you look at

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