Deanna Allred: Rhetorical Analysis

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On August 29, 2016 I walked in to the Family Life building of Utah State University knowing that I was not going to be a fan of my first class – English 1010. I knew I would not like it because I had learned to hate writing for someone other than myself in my senior year of high school. I had a teacher who loved to make essays and papers bleed with red ink. She told us it was to improve our writing; what it really did was make me hate writing. Deanna Allred did not have the goal to grammatically correct us into submission; she wanted to show us our writing could be good and our writing was allowed to start out bad. Deanna Allred had us explore different genres and our cultural eyes. In her class I wrote a personal essay, a rhetorical analysis, …show more content…
When we were assigned to write a rhetorical analysis, the purpose was to analyze without our emotions. Being the over-achiever I am, I chose the article that I would find the most difficulty remaining objective over – “What’s the Matter with Creationism?” by Katha Pollitt. I did not agree with her stance and the way she explained her argument made me angry. I knew that I could let my emotions override my logic while analyzing her essay, but I did not let that happen. I chose that article because I felt it was just as important to hold my emotions away from my writing as it was to let them flow from every …show more content…
I learned about my cultural eye and how it applies to my major in sociology. I got to explore different genres from personal to rhetorical analysis to research in argumentative essays. I cannot begin to explain everything else I have learned in this class. The biggest take away I got was finding out how my writing pertains to me. It does not matter what genre I am writing in; it does not matter whether my writing is dripping with emotion or my writing has emotion set aside. My writing is a part of who I am and to anyone who reads it, it is who I am. Deanna Allred helped me learn who that person on the page was, and for that, I will always be grateful she was the one who taught me English

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