Hi! My name is Emma Stokes, and I’m majoring in business and on the pre-law track. I used to be majoring in political science, but I decided to switch to business after a short month, so this is my first semester taking business classes. I’m loving it though. I hope to go to law school in New York after undergrad to become a lawyer. In fact, I was planning on going to Fordham for undergraduate school, but due to me being very bad at making even the smallest decision, I went to Iowa. I am thinking about family law, although I haven’t done much research into other fields, so that is very tentative. My hobbies include watching Impractical Jokers, hanging out with my friends, and playing volleyball. I have two cats (Buttercup is pictured, I promise he likes me) and a dog that I love very much, as well as a younger sister and brother.  

I hope to improve upon my writing and critical thinking skills in this course. These skills are very important if I want to become a lawyer, and I hope this course will help set me on the right track for my future. I am a little nervous about taking this class because I haven’t taken an English class since high school, so I haven’t written much in a while. I’m hoping this class will help reintroduce me to those skills, as well as improve them. I think reading and writing skills are very valuable because they help the brain process information faster, which benefits nearly every aspect of one’s life.  

Heinrichs mentions that rhetoric is all around us, which is a concept I hadn’t thought of before reading Thank You For Arguing. However, after doing so, I have noticed many instances of rhetoric in my everyday life. One example is a recent conversation I had with my dad. My phone screen is cracked, and through our insurance we can have a person come to our house and fix it for a lot cheaper than it would be to go to an apple store or something like that. So my dad scheduled the appointment over break, but he had the person coming to our house after I went back to college. This annoyed me because I didn’t want to come back home just to get my phone fixed. He rescheduled it, but there were a lot of complications with the company. We have been trying to get it sorted out since Thanksgiving break, and my phone is still cracked. Recently I called him because the person was supposed to come to campus the other day, and I had just gotten a job the day before and was scheduled to work during the time he would be here. I called my dad and asked him to reschedule it and he sounded pretty annoyed. This annoyed me because I had the mindset that it was completely his fault we were in this mess because he scheduled the first appointment for a day I was at college. However, after learning about rhetoric and arguments, I realized that this wasn’t something I should be thinking. I was arguing in the past and blaming him for something that was equally my fault. This opened my eyes to how the situation must have been stressing him out too, because he had been having to deal with the situation while he was at work trying to make money. This instance of rhetoric changed my outlook on the whole situation, and I only realized how the argument was pointless because of reading Thank You For Arguing.