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.

Writing wasn’t something that I excelled at in high school, or really even college. It didn’t take me one day to figure everything out… everything meaning my sources/outlines etc. This class did challenge me. When writing these papers, as my professor said… “it’s not a linear path”. This process was multiple stages. I was exploring and finding new sources and ideas even later in my process. It wasn’t like “oh I found 5 sources in the beginning, this is it”. No, I was finding articles when writing my rebuttal(my rebuttal was on freedom of speech). An argument that I made that demonstrates the “multiple stages” was my rebuttal argument. I had to explore not only my topic(social media hate, but explore the opposite side. My topic was about “social media banning mechanism for users who are mean to other users, and my rebuttal was on “freedom of speech”. I discovered that there were multiple counter arguments that I could’ve used, freedom of speech and the effectiveness of banning.  I had to form a strong supporting argument, and I developed all of that into a paper with the hypothesis of “Instagram should include a mechanism for banning users who are mean to other users if the number of complaints lodged against them is credible and sufficient.”

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. 

Core value 2 was something that was really important throughout the year with writing. When It came to our assignments (stone money, definition/causal/rebuttal), you really had to think critically and connect texts from articles to discussions.  An example that I think embodied Core value 2 was Stone Money. Personally, I really had to read into all the articles and podcasts given, and it was slightly difficult. I had to critically think about all of the information and try to formulate it into 1000 words. You had to make 1000 words out of more than one resource, the three part podcast, and the article.

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.

When writing I had to figure out my audience. My professor touched on this a ton during our class discussions, and It really made me realize who our ideal readers are and what they look for in a way. My visual rewrite is something that demonstrates CV 3. The visual assignment was where we had to watch a 30-sec video and describe it without sound, second by second. According to my professor, “everything’s an argument”, and that video was a visual argument. I had to show what it was saying, and describe what the whole video was. It’s like showing it to my audience who doesn’t know much about my topic. The purpose of my writing was to voice my argument to my 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.

This core value was something I demonstrated in all of my arguments, but if I had to pick a specific one it would probably be my definition argument.  The whole point of each person’s hypothesis was that it is something that is not only your idea, but is something that is important to us. My topic about social media hate was important. This hypothesis was important to me, and because of that I put a lot of effort into finding evidence and sources/illustrations. So, with the beginning states of our hypothesis we have to do a lot of research to write a definition argugment. I evaluated a lot of sources, researching to see which sources would work for my papers. I also grabbed sources that would support my rebuttal arguement. I had to find specific examples about celebs who have experienced hate/hate speech on social media, and I found a lot of and a couple of those sources did make it to my paper.

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. 

Throughout my papers I made sure that it was important to cite my sources. Ethically, it’s not fair to not cite your sources in your papers because that’s practically saying that you said those quotes from those articles, when you really didn’t. An example that demonstrates this is my final research paper. I had to gather resources and cite them in my articles. All of my quotes in the paper are from the cited sources down on the reference list.