Writing & Rhetoric: Week 3

            This class continues to diverge greatly from any of my past English classes, or any class for that matter. One of my favorite activities over the course of the past three weeks was watching the videos about natural gases. This topic was my favorite because I have never talked about the truth in such detail or openly discussed it with other classmates. We first watched a commercial from America's Natural Gas Alliance, which showed much bias in terms of the viewpoint that the information was coming from- farmers, owner, founder, etc. They claimed that natural gas is a safe thing and their commercial was more about the idea of natural gas rather than the actual science of how it is derived. This only made the next video we watched more intriguing in that it spoke negatively about natural gas and the dangers of it and how it is actually obtained, whereas the last video only covered the benefits and advantages of natural gas. 

            Watching these videos me realize that a lot of what we "know" (accepted truths) are a combination of numerous views and may not be true after all. One of my favorite quotes about science that I heard months ago from Adam Savage is "the only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down". This activity in class also reminded me that truth depends on who is telling the story in our world and who has the authority to call it truth. Aside from openly discussing truth in English 1103, I also enjoyed talking about literacy and writing in response to Gawandi. From this I have learned that we always have a purpose when we write, whether our opinions or objectives are directly stated or not. I also came to realize that what we choose to write and how we choose to write it ties into our identities. I could relate this to my own writing just by reviewing what I've chosen to write about for the five minutes that we worked on our writing into the day. So far, everything we've done in this class has only helped me find out more about myself, along with finding my strengths and weaknesses in creativity, writing and the way I intend to portray myself versus the way I actually do.