Marica Miley
Professor Betsy Woods
English 111 RL
7 December 2010
Final Essay
As a writer and communicator, I have constantly been changing and developing
throughout my life. It began with my first word as a baby, progressed when I started school
and developed reading and writing skills, and became remarkably more advanced as I
proceeded through high school and started at Miami. Not only have I been required to analyze,
recommend, summarize, and persuade, I have also practiced communication through
presentations. In many of my courses this semester I have had to present information on a
topic to an audience. As I further my education, new technologies are presenting new and
quicker forms of communication. This is where my first college essay comes into play. In this
essay, I explain how a large portion of communication in my life at this point completely
revolves around technology. In the following excerpt from my Inquiry #1 essay, I provide
examples of modern methods of communication:
“If I need to talk to someone, they’re just a phone call
away. I can call and make appointments, call a support line for
help with technology problems, call in to work and ask for my
schedule, or call and activate my new credit card. I can get
online and look up an old friend on Facebook, check the
balance of my bank account, or just Google a question for
a quick answer.”—Inquiry 1
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been required to write recommendations, primarily in my
business writing course. The hardest part about this was remembering the proper format for a
business memo. I enjoy writing recommendations, because they are based on my own opinion,
and usually I know a lot about the topic I’m being required to elaborate on. In this excerpt, I
was asked to recommend one of two speeches based on which one was better suited for a
given purpose:
“Gate’s speech gave some solid facts and figures.
She got straight to the point, and was really descriptive in
that she provided examples and stories to go along with
each point she made. She included multiple aspects and
strategies of business. The audience at Gate’s speech
most likely learned a lot more useful information when it
comes to business and marketing strategies. Her speech
could provide our company with some new techniques for
expansion.” – Speech Recommendation
Also in my business writing course, we were required to listen to a speech and
summarize it, then cut it down to 100 words or less. This is a very important skill in the
business world, because almost anything being written within a company will need to be clean
and concise, only the most crucial information needs to be passed on, otherwise the memo or
email will be ignored. The easy part was listening to the speech and typing up all the main
components; the hard part was cleaning up it and narrowing it down to only 100 words, which
makes up a short paragraph. Below is an excerpt from my initial summarization of a speech
given by Melinda Gates on non-profit organizations.
“It’s very important to take into consideration what the
people actually want; you sometimes have to make them want
something that they might actually really need. The three
things that Gates observed about Coke were: taking real-time
data and feeding it back into the product immediately, tapping
into local entrepreneurial talent, and incredible marketing
strategies.”—Melinda Gates Speech Summarization
One analysis I completed for this course was my best one yet, in my opinion. It was a
rhetorical analysis on a speech Hillary Clinton gave on women’s rights. At first, I dreaded this
assignment because I think most speeches are monotone, lengthy, and boring. I ended up
enjoying it after all, once I found this speech and listened to it. While I’m not a fan of Hillary
Clinton, I agree entirely with the points she made in this particular speech. This was the first
time I was ever introduced to rhetoric, but I still had no problems using my notes to analyze the
rhetorical methods she used in her speech. Here is a selection from my rhetorical analysis:
“Pathos, or appeal to emotion, is what this speech revolves
around. Clinton gives quite a few horrifying examples of the way
women are abused and treated unjustly. She paints a picture for the
audience that is intended to make them feel sympathy toward the
victims of this violence. One really upsetting example was when
she stated, “It is a violation of human rights when a leading
cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the
violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their own
relatives.” This statistic probably surprised many people in the
audience and maybe even hit close to home for many
others.”—Hillary Clinton Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Another essay I’ve written that I’m very confident in would be my persuasive piece. My
purpose was to convince the audience that for numerous reasons, the legal drinking age should
be 18. I did a lot of research for this paper and came up with some good support. I also
created a web site to portray all the facts and statistics in a simple, easy to read way. While
writing this essay, I even learned some new facts. The following is a passage from this
persuasive essay:
“If the minimum drinking age would be
lowered to eighteen, a lot of problems with binge
drinking would be solved. If young people were taught
to drink in moderation rather than ‘drink to get drunk,’
we wouldn’t have so many underage arrests and
irresponsible actions. If America is all about freedom,
why do we have more restrictions on something so
petty while almost every other country in the world is more
lenient? If a person is old enough to make life-altering
decisions about their career path, marriage, or possibly dying
for their country, shouldn’t they be wise enough to drink
responsibly? These are only a small portion of reasons, all
backed up by statistics, to lower the minimum drinking age in
America to eighteen.”—Inquiry 3
One last form of writing I’ve practiced repeatedly throughout the
semester would be opinion papers. In my zoology lab, each week we would be
required to turn in an opinion paper regarding an ethical issue in the medical
field. This type of writing is simple because all you need to do is read a short
article and form an opinion based on what you know. Below is a small
paragraph from an opinion paper I wrote about gene testing:
“This is just a big controversy, because if you look at it
from the angle that someone could prevent or treat the disease
early if they are aware, that is definitely a good thing. But if
you look at it from the angle that someone will be told there is
an 85% chance they will die, that is just cause for unnecessary
worry. Or if you look at it from the angle that a person could
lose opportunities for employment because of their genetics,
that is discrimination and there are laws against that.”—Gene
Testing Opinion Paper
Throughout my first semester in college alone I feel as if my writing and communication
skills have improved immensely. I’ve experimented with many different varieties of essays and
other forms of writing. After practicing so much, writing comes a lot easier to me. Although
right now I feel like my writing doesn’t have a huge amount of room for improvement, I realize
there can always be revisions and progress. I believe I will continue to develop and improve as
a writer and communicator for the rest of my life.