As I am exploring my writing capabilities, I find that I am struggling to maintain the ability to switch off my overly proper academic and scientific writing style to write more personally and laid back. I find it difficult to write about things where I am not given a topic and I simply supply the facts. Exploring personal reflection and different writing styles is difficult, yet intriguing to me. I have this struggle because I have always been a very science and math based student. Therefore, the majority of my writing has consisted of theses supported by scientific fact and elaborate justifications. When writing an open ended prompt with a more personal topic I find it difficult to fully express the topic of  the writing prompt. Not only am I experiencing this problem, but I also find that I am a rather less-than-direct writer. I often lack conciseness and beat around the bush when addressing topics for fear of almost being too direct and surface-perfect.
To address these problems I am constantly trying to reflect upon and review my writings. I observe whether or not I am addressing the prompt, and if I am, how long does it take for me to get the point across. I make sure to thoroughly understand the prompt I am answering and the end goal before i begin brainstorming and writing. Hopefully these attempts will work on my areas of weakness, and I will discover new techniques to further develop myself into a good writer. A writer capable of academia as well as personal writing.

My initial reaction to Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" was one of pride. Being a member of an immigrant family and a second generation American myself, I can totally understand where she is coming from with the 'different Englishes' that she speaks regarding where she is, what she is doing, and whom she is speaking to. I am so thankful that she overcame her embarrassment and continued to develop her personality into her career and accept the lifestyle that she was born into. She really drew on her ethos, or credibility, when she opened up her excerpt and stated "I am not a scholar on English or literature..." she was openly stating that she cannot give more than personal opinion and all that she has to say is credible based on personal experience. She is not trying to give fact based on her PhD or other extra credentials. Rhetorically, Amy Tan is brilliant in that she draws on personal experience using pathos to force the reader to empathize with her transition from embarrassment to embracement.
When analyzing the two pieces collectively, I would say that Tan and Douglass both use pathos and kairos most effectively of all of the rhetorical strategies available throughout both of their pieces. I say this because both Tan and Douglass perfectly incorporate the different aspects of their respective purposes in a well thought out, timely manner. There is no moment is either of the excerpts where one feels that "her example came too soon", or "his personal story would have been better appreciated earlier in the text". One example of well done kairos in Tan's excerpt was the parallel juxtaposition of two sentences, the first being what her mother was telling her in "broken english", and the second being what she was actually saying to the man on the phone in "proper english". One example of well done kairos in Douglass' excerpt comes when he approaches the subject of his mistress teaching him to read. If he had began the story earlier in the excerpt it would have felt awkward and misplaced. However, Douglass began his story at an appropriate time and therefore the story was very fluid in motion.
There were moments where I felt less than persuaded by the author throughout both of these pieces. In Tan's piece, I would have strayed away from the amount of times she exemplified her mother's inability to speak "proper" English. Her examples, while well done and thought out, gave the piece a bit of redundancy and therefore made it harder to follow all the way through. In Douglass' piece I would have been more clear that he was taking us into his beginning of life, rather than just mentioning things happening in the past. I felt unsure of the exact timeline of his story and whether or not he was speaking about himself presently or in the past.

My personal reaction to Douglass' narrative was one of astonishment, embarrassment and pride. Through reading Douglass' journey and pathway from birth to enslavement, to violence, to education, to freedom it instilled a sense of pride for Douglass. All that he accomplished in the face of such setbacks and oppression opened up my eyes to all that we have in today's society that we as citizens of America, myself included, take advantage of every day. For Douglass, learning and education was a joyous experience for him that lead to his ultimate freedom. Education is still the pathway to freedom for every man, woman and child that lives today. Douglass calls on pathos to create a sense of empathy that one has for him to force yourself to experience the pain, anguish, anticipation and release that he experienced on his journey of life. Through re-living these experiences with him I as a human became astonished and embarrassed that one human could have treated another the way that humans treated Douglass and other Africans. He purposefully takes you back through his lifetime and personal experiences, using logos appeal, so as to create the perfect timeline and allow the reader to experience the joyous ending he had as a free man. Douglass used both logos and pathos appeal to tug perfectly on my heart strings and allow me to enjoy and experience his journey similarly as to how he did and did again in writing this excerpt.

When thinking about rhetorical moves in real life used persuasively, I seem to draw a bit of a blank. However in reading Understanding Rhetoric, I now have a more clear and direct idea of the types of rhetorical strategies and how they can be used in every day life. I guess the best example of using a rhetorical move persuasively that I can think of personally would be when applying to colleges. I worked for a long time to compile a perfect combination of ethos, logos, pathos and kairos to portray a just portfolio of my works, grades, schedules and extra curricular activities. By doing so I portrayed myself the best I could to appeal to colleges as a worthy candidate for acceptance. Needless to say it worked, however in thinking about it, I most definitely used rhetorical strategies to my advantage. I portrayed a self of me that although true in its nature, is not the whole me, not the entire me, and not the realest me. However, everyone knows if I was some over-emotional freak on paper I would probably have been looked down upon. Needless to say I used rhetoric persuasively to 'put on my best face' to appeal to colleges and gain acceptance into institutions of higher learning.

2.2

• This portfolio is a collaboration of my works throughout this semester in Rhetoric 110-11. Overall I wish to portray a clear representation of the pathway that I took to successfully reinvent myself as an academic, professional and social writer. I hope that by allowing myself to partake in the journey of portfolio keeping, I will enhance my writing capabilities as well as my ability to accept that there is constantly room for improvement. In the end I hope that my final portfolio will show where I started, what I did, and where I am in the end; although in the true nature of learning there is never an end, only a beginning and a path.