The Purpose Of The English Language

To me, the English language has sometimes felt like a non-topical subject; the ever-present facet of the daily lives of people across the world. In my years before higher education, language did not really have an impact on how I viewed the world, because it felt like a part of standard living; English and Korean at home, English at school. Even with the study of English in Advanced Placement classes, I always felt that the study of English was even sometimes stress-inducing, reading the works of dead writers, whose writings were filled with mannerisms that no one uses today. Yet, after I went into academia, I began to explore the true purpose of language, realizing that it is more than just a tool for communication, but a whole world of ideas …show more content…
In both the research paper and satire assignment, I could explore aspects of each genre that I never realized to be so prominent, and to see parts of academic culture that I have also not been exposed to before. With research papers I have done in previous classes, there was never a sense of rhetoric, or of having a guiding question to lead interest; a research paper was frequently the dreaded largest assignment of the semester, necessitating hours of online searching. On the other hand, in looking at academic sources through rhetorical analysis, I feel that I could appreciate even the most mundane of research statistics. I wrote that the article that led me to choose intellectualism in higher education as my research topic “resonated with me; although I am in higher education for a diverse, meaningful education, it’s not too hard to see that in a lot of cases, earning a degree is simply just pushing us towards the job market, just because most jobs nowadays require a college degree, and for many, is the only reason why they go to college.” Likewise, the satire unit and assignment really transformed how I look at satire, in its duality in being humorous, yet at the same time also being a vessel for advocating change and a call to action. The assignment itself was a culmination of the rhetorical analysis and research paper, yet, as I expressed, with a degree of flexibility that both previous assignments didn’t have, in catering to a specific audience, and not needing to show the slightest hint of objectivity. Through analyzing the rhetoric of conservative viewpoints, and using the research I conducted for the research paper, this assignment acted as a gateway to my newly evolved understanding of English, and even in writing outside of the bounds I would