Throughout the course of this class, I have had the opportunity to connect with and learn a lot from my pretty incredible classmates and expand on my writing skills thanks to an encouraging professor. An area that I can continue to work on improving throughout my college career is constructing valid arguments and backing them up with adequate evidence while maintaining a solid structure throughout each of the essays that I will have to write in the foreseeable future. I have developed plenty of tools from this class that will help me to successfully do this, such as how to spot when an author is using certain rhetorical techniques to sway your opinion or how to properly analyze the rhetoric of any given advertisement, object or space.

I have taken away many things from this course, but perhaps the most important thing I have learned is to embrace change and really listen to what my peers’ thoughts and ideas are before reaching a conclusion on any topic. It is important to learn as much about a topic before you construct your own personal opinion regarding it. Before taking this class, I always thought of myself as a talker, rather than a listener, but after taking this class I have realized that there is much to learn in the empty spaces between the conversation and the thoughts in my head formulating what I want to say next.

Rhetoric will deeply impact my academic life moving forward, because it has taught me more about myself and how I can form opinions about an argument by seeing what the rhetorical devices are trying to convey. The knowledge gained from this class also impacts my daily life, in how I respond to differing opinions, in how I formulate thoughts in my head, and in how I view the world around me and embrace the changes that come with life. Even after switching from normal learning to online, the things I have learned from rhetoric have remained a building block in each of my classes. Although the transition has been tough, we, as students, are like butterflies and we have taken this as an opportunity to grow and transform into better, more appreciative versions of ourselves. Instead of fearing change, each of us has accepted the fact that sometimes the situation is far out of our control. And change isn’t always necessarily a bad thing, because if nothing ever changed, we would never learn from our mistakes, see our ability to grow, and there wouldn’t be any butterflies.