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.

I believe during the semester I displayed numerous examples of core value one through my rewrites on essays. Throughout the course I received plenty of feedback, generously enough from you, that allowed me to further develop my essays. At first the feedback section that you left was intimidating. I was nervous to read everything because it was so in depth. As the semester carried on though and as I read more feedback, I realized this is how I could best develop my ideas. I corresponded with you on the post’s which helped me get a better idea of what I needed to omit and what I needed to produce more of. The example that first comes to mind is my definition essay. A lot of new sources were given which helped me to further discover my topic and draw several more conclusions.

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.

This core value is definitely my weakest section, but I believe I was still able to display this a few times this semester. Core value two was needed to read critically and pick out important ideas when developing my research essay in order to find the proper evidence that I needed to present to make a powerful conclusion. Though, the best example of this core value can be seen in the Stone Money assignment. This assignment brought in several outside sources that I had to read and listen to including the NPR Broadcast. Critical reading skills were necessary here to not only link together several ideas from different communities, but also to create my own argument based on these sources of evidence. Synthesizing several ideas after I evaluated each of the claims allowed me to communicate this in my own conclusion and argument.

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.

Throughout this semester I displayed core value three to a high standard. The assignment I completed that specifically shows this is my visual rhetoric analysis. This assignment led me to identify argumentative and rhetorical elements and concepts in a short video advertisement and interpret that to the best of my ability. From this 30 second video I was able to figure out who the audience was, as well interpreting a frame by frame analyzation of the authors strategies to get the point across. I created a rhetorically savvy argument from the video in order to display and familiarize the audience with why each scene was produced. I also made the purpose of the visual argument easy to understand with my analysis which demonstrated that I could understand the purpose and context the video down to the second and produce it in a different way.

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.

I have confidence that core value four was one of the most important in my development this semester. I demonstrated that I met the expectations of this value through my rebuttal essay. During this assignment I gathered many sources of information from public bases and was able to formulate my own ideas and interpretations against them. The sources that I gathered needed to be evaluated for evidence against my hypothesis if I wanted to be able to properly incorporate them into my rebuttal essay. When locating these sources and evaluating them I had to be careful when concluding which ones were best suited for my final product. Documenting my sources correctly was also a key part of this core value which I did by including citations in my reference section of the essay.

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.

I feel that core value five is one of the most obvious and can be best represented in my annotated bibliography assignment. In this assignment I was able to credit others for their ideas that were used to create my final research paper. I had to cite the authors in the format that was instructed for all of the sources used. When I described the sources, I made sure to describe where they were specifically used and how they helped develop my ideas. I was able to include the sources while avoiding fallacious or manipulative argumentation by prioritizing logic while picking out articles and authors. By citing the sources used in the bibliography I kept my academic integrity and created a solid voice between what were my own thoughts, and what the original ideas of the authors were.