My moments -Chao

I am sure that I learn a lot of new things in last two weeks which also confused me for a long time. There are three moments that I won't forget which make me feel clear in the rhetorical situation, genre, etc. 

The first moment happened in class when we were discussing the reading material that we read last day: "Crowle and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics." I almost kept silence in that discussing because I was so confused about the meaning of rhetoric. I read the material and I knew what the ancient rhetoric was and what the modern American rhetoric was. However, it is so upset to me that my dictionary shows the rhetoric means the way to make something more easy to understand in Chinese. In the discussion, I listened a lot of descriptions and definitions about rhetoric and made a decide that I must understand and accept the meaning of rhetoric which we are talking about. and delete the transfer meaning of rhetoric from dictionary. It makes me feel better to think with the new meaning of rhetoric when I am writing.  

The second moment happened in the mini project day that we needed to make a simple book and published it. I worked with Danielle and Angel. We firstly discussed the basic elements about the book. In fact, I knew nothing about what are the favorite things for mid age people in America but I did know that we must design the topic that would attract these audiences. In that moment, I think I refer to the audience, genre, and reflection in this discussion because we need to know what our audiences like. Then we can move to next step to find which genre or situation will attract them most. At that time, I ensured that genre is the situation or environment like in Chinese which set up to make content more clear and acceptable for audience. And finally, we discussed what our audience would reflect to our topic and showed them in the poster which would attract them also. This experience conflicted me in the understanding of genre, audience, and reflection a lot. As a writer, I think some moments will make me understand better like the mini project day.

The third moment that helps me to understand the rhetoric that it is not easy for foreigners to understand some new concepts in literature because of the culture diversities.

In Wednesday afternoon, I talked with Professor Kara. I talked about the understanding of rhetorical situation. It is really hard sometimes for foreigner if their cultures don’t have the same meaning with the conceptions in another culture. Even we do have the same word of rhetoric, but the meaning is different in some ways which confused me for a long time. In this meeting, I understand that the way to accept new meaning is to delete the old or not suitable meaning of the conceptions.

All these moments help me to understand better on the conception of rhetoric, genre, etc. Learning to be a good writer is a process, especially for international students.