Self Reflection on Literacy Narrative

The genre of this essay is a rhetorical response essay. I used many personal connections to the essay in order to try and entice the reader and to get them to see the two illustrations from my point of view. The main reason to writing this essay was to tell my perspective, or my side of the story. Many individuals have their own thoughts and perspectives on what the two illustrations meant to them. Whether they’re ideas are influenced with how they grew up, their political affiliation, or simply just what they want to say, everybody’s opinion is unique.

I wanted to express my opinion with my own flair to tell others my personal thoughts on this subject and to hopefully allow others to be able to see it from a new point of view, as opposed to only having your own personal view and no other view. I did this by mentioning things that had occurred in my life such as the presidential election as well as talking about a show that I had watched in the past.

The audience for this paper was for the class, but mainly aimed on the side that did not see anything wrong with the illustration that depicted Betsy DeVos as being similar to Ruby Bridges. I wanted to make the point that these should not have been related to one another whatsoever with the context that was presented. The audience and the writer in opinion based papers are meant to see through each other’s papers and view the world through their eyes. Certain assumptions that I’ve done through the essay is that the audience had already viewed the two illustrations beforehand, as well as being aware of some basic knowledge of events that occurred during the 1900s in the U.S. I also made the assumption that the reader was mainly neutral, maybe leaning towards a liberal standpoint.

Overall it was an interesting experience writing this essay. It allowed for me to make connections to events that occurred in my life and to media that I had watched. As well as this, it was able to make me reflect on personal events that I hadn’t had once considered was all that significant in my life. A majority of the time, I had joked along with friends with this situation but upon further inspection, it showed me how it’s still despicable that people genuinely still think like bigoted monsters as people have just like in the past. In the end, being a minority allowed for me to relate and resulted in me doing my best to try and explain my viewpoints with what I thought was right and wrong with both illustrations given the circumstances.

Self Reflection on Exploratory Essay

This essay continued to challenge me once more. The story I had chosen was “The Black cat” written by Edgar Allan Poe. It as a story I had already been familiar with as I read it earlier in high school. Not only this, but it also was a disturbing tale that I had enjoyed the first time and although writing another essay on the same story may seem boring, I believed it would allow for me to better my writing by writing an essay on a story with a brand new perspective.

I chose out three main Freudian terms that I had noticed as I read the story which were displacement, parapraxis and wishful impulse. Displacement was something that was very obvious to me and most likely everybody who chose this story. At first I was a little bit confused to figure out where from where was the displaced anger coming from, but I figured that the alcohol the narrator consumed so often was his source of anger but he had no way to get angry at anything but the closest thing that irritated him as getting mad at yourself wasn’t something that the narrator would do.

Next would be wishful impulse which I had debated on myself with to either pick this, or repression. I figured that saying repression would be a bit too broad, so I decided instead to be a bit more specific and have the paragraph dedicated to wishful impulse. The narrator’s wishful impulse of violence was something that I firmly believe due to his many violent acts and I tried to support my argument by mentioning the many atrocities he committed and connecting it to one variable which was violence.

My last point would be on parapraxis which I may have been reaching a bit far, but again, I believe firmly that this was a slip of the tongue that came as a result of the narrator’s unconscious thoughts. His actions that got him caught was satisfying to see, as well as it being a cool little moment that connected to Freud once again.

Research was fairly straight forward, but using only the three available sources was a little bit strange. Regardless, I thought it went fairly well. I would have liked to add a few more quotes, but I already felt that I had added more than enough. All in all, a challenging essay that I feel that I learned much from.

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