exploring MY ethos

Did I find myself, and not look for others to tell me who I am? That was my goal for this first year of college. I needed to know who I was before I could attempt to pursue the rest of my life. There are certain things that define me, and certain things that I do for fun that helped me figure all this nonsense out. A couple of those things are; laughter, is sounds silly but it is key to everything I love. Corny jokes, funny movies, and just being with friends. Probably the most important one, for the sake of this assignment, is writing. I love to write, but it’s a different kind of writing. I’ll get a feeling and hear one phrase that just speaks. An example of this is something I think I heard in class one day which is ‘structured chaos’. Mr. Mitchell said it one day examining the board about the lists we had written down. I immediately pulled out my phone and the ideas just started flowing.
This doesn’t really show up in most of my papers because I don’t know how to harness my ideas and make them presentable that people may understand. The closest I got to this was the very first blog assignment, about advertising. I picked a poster that dealt with baseball and Passion, ‘There is no other way to play than all out.’ I explained what it was this poster said to me, and why is described me as a person, having not played a day of baseball in my life. “This poster describes me because I love a challenge….” I feel there are so many challenges in life, and they are a great thing! I loved the challenge in my writing, did I always succeed? That’s a negative, but it made me better and I realized my style of writing more. I had only an inkling of an idea before this semester that my writing is actually important to me. I had just thought it was a bit of silliness and that I would grow out of it.
The topics were interesting, and broadened our horizons while letting us keep our opinions. For the most part I agreed and the only paper I was bored with was the technology assignment, and that was because I picked the most dull and broad subject of ‘computers’. I tried to write facts and still express my creativity, which made it hard to read and very abstract. An example of the difficulty reading it can be expressed by the comment from Paul Mitchell of the University of Oklahoma at the end of my paper “I feel your claim doesn’t truly appear until your conclusion paragraph. Without knowing what’s going on, it’s very hard to follow your body paragraphs”. I have trouble writing where other people can understand what it is I’m talking about.
This can affect the ethos of my papers, which make people not want to read what I have to say. Ethos, defined in Essentials of Argument “the writer develops a sense of awareness of the audience’s background, and finds a way to appeal to them’. (Wood, Nancy; Essentials; pg 164) I don’t usually appeal to my audiences which is my problem with my writing.
Did I find myself? Yes, I know who I am and what I am about. Did this class help? Of course, anything you do which requires you to look inside will help you to figure out who you are and what you want. Am I going to continue blogging? No, I was worried about people critiquing my work, and once there isn’t a format I might revert to the way I usually write, which is abstract and hard to follow. I learned a lot this semester, and I will apply this =)
They say, to laugh is to love, as to live is to enjoy—I say, to feel is to hurt to know you’re alive. With one comes another, so open your heart and be damned if you don’t get what you want.