YES WAY! School is relevant!!! (Source: Giphy)

During my CTW class last Friday, we had a re-cap of all the things that we learned this quarter and last quarter. We came up with a pretty comprehensive list, naming things like archival research, how to use sources, finding gaps, entering the conversation, rhetorical context, etc.

The next step of this was to look at how we could apply this in our lives after we finish this class. This was really interesting for me because a lot of the time I feel that I just cram a bunch of useless information into my brain for the quarter and then lose it once I move onto the next class. This class was different and I could think of SO MANY applications of the knowledge I learned! But, the one thing that I kept thinking about was media, news and just any published information.

For example, this class taught me to be skeptical about my sources and understand who they are before I believe their “facts” to be true. A while back, we did an activity where we evaluated source validity. Ultimately, this lead us to a publication about Martin Luther King by a group called Stormfront. Most of us didn’t realize that Stormfront is actually a white supremacist group who created one of the Internet’s first major racial hate sites (Wikipedia).

Yeah…it was pretty bad…
(Source: Giphy)

Also, exploring rhetorical context and the rhetorical triangle further gave me a name for something I already practiced. For example, I knew that your message and delivery of the argument are going to differ depending on the audience; you wouldn’t say the same things to a group of college students and a group of elderly people because they value different things! This is pathos.

Similarly, I knew that all writing must have a purpose, otherwise, why do it? Some people are writing to persuade, while others inform or even entertain. I didn’t realize the importance of an author’s purpose though. For example, if someone is writing to persuade you, you should probably check their sources and their facts to see if their argument is valid.