Critical Reading

Critical reading differs from skimming or normal reading in many different ways.  Critical reading is when you read an article or paper with the intent of getting all you can from it.  When you critically read you analyze all of the sentences contained and the rhetorical devises used throughout.  By critically reading you can discover what works in a paper and apply it to your own writing.

Logos

In my opinion, Logos is the most powerful of the three.  Logos is when you use logic, or facts to convince your reader of a certain viewpoint.  I am a very logical man, so using logos in my writing comes pretty easily to me.  Logos does not just have to be numerical facts, but you can use words to convince another logically why one option is better than the other.  I love logos, and have come to notice all the times I use it in my everyday life.

Pathos

The use of Pathos in an educational setting can have a profound impact on how effective ones work is. Pathos is the use of various rhetorical tools to create an emotional appeal in your readers.  By creating different ties of emotion with your text and the reader, your reader becomes engrossed in and connected to your writing and desires to continue to read.  Some tools you can use to make pathos are personal stories, or sad facts.

Visual Rhetoric

Visual rhetoric is a tool that can be used to effectively boost the persuasiveness of a work by engaging the readers.  Of course it is possible to engage readers through words, but when you use visual aids such as photos and graphs, it allows the reader to be more entertained, while also allowing them to learn in a different way.  I am excited to use visual rhetoric in our multimodal assignment.  We will use graphs which will effectively portray our point.

Counter-arguments

Counter-arguments are essential for any good paper.  They not only open the readers eyes to different perspectives on topics but also can strengthen your paper.  I would be a lot more inclined to listen to someone with knowledge on both sides of an issue as opposed to someone with knowledge on only one side.  Countering the counter-argument in your paper can help you dispel concern among readers, therefore making your paper more persuasively powerful.  I took a whole paragraph to address important counter-arguments to my topic, as well as addressing them at other parts of my paper. 

Doing Research

Doing research is probably the most important part of writing a research paper.  It is, after all, called a research paper.  Research is essential to a paper so that you  can back up your stance with evidence, along with other peoples opinions.  I really enjoyed learning how to research things through the library.  It is very helpful in finding how different topics interact.  It is helpful in finding specific studies about your topic. 

Research Questions and Topic Refinement

I wasn't able to make it when we went over this topic, but I will go off of my own knowledge.  For me it is very hard to decide a topic, because it has to be a good one that you and others have interest in, or you won't be able to write a whole paper.  So an effective way to choose a topic is to do something you have interest in, and ask others if they have interest as well.  But first you should write down all the different topics you have interest in, then ask people about each of them and use the process of elimination.  I still have only a vague idea of what I want to do. This causes me too much stress.