Week Four Response

Rhetorical Analysis is a completely new topic for me. It is definitely challenging for me since I have never encountered something like this before in high school. Personally, writing has always been difficult for me, especially when generating the initial draft. Thus, it was obviously not straightforward for me to develop the first draft. During the drafting process, I struggled to find a way to frame my thoughts in the essay. The ideas I had in my mind seemed choppy and all over the place. Therefore, my first draft is very messy because I did not know where to start and I just wrote as I go.

Coming up with a thesis statement was another obstacle I had to overcome. In high school, I was always told that thesis statement needs to be brief and is usually a sentence or two long. Rather than a thesis statement, it is a thesis sentence. However, the “Sample Thesis Statement” group assignment really helped me understand the elements that a thesis statement needs to have and provided a guideline for me to write the thesis statement for my own paper.

Moreover, most of the papers I wrote before this course were summaries or book reviews of the novels I read, which did not involve critical thinking at all. All I did was write about what happened in the story and give a conclusion. However, in this assignment, the prompt states that the purpose of this essay is to “analyze a text in order to explain how it is shaped by the horror genre or the historical/cultural time period in which it was created”. This is not asking for a summary anymore but instead, I need to include my own interpretation of the story in the paper, which was a challenge for me. In the past, I only need to memorize the plots of the stories and write about the scenes, but now I have to think about what is the author trying to tell the audience from the text, which was extremely tough because I usually do not think about it.

To be honest, I know that the writing process of this paper will not be easy but I am not afraid of it. I believe that it would improve my critical thinking and analysis skills as a writer and provide foundation for my writing in the future in both academic and professional settings.