Unit 5 Post #1

My posts have significantly improved since the beginning of the year. My very first post,  In Standoff, Latest Sign of Unions Under Siege, wasn't very good, mainly because I wasn't really sure what I was doing. Instead of writing a cohesive argument, it was very choppy, because I treated the guidelines like a check-list. Instead of writing a smooth post including a summary, analysis of rhetorical devices, etc. the post was more like a sentence or two about one point before moving onto the next point without a transition. It was also really short, because I thought that I needed to strictly adhere to the 200-250 word limit.
     I have gotten very good at analyzing paintings, as seen in The Scream Re-Write. In this post especially, I understood how the colors and lines helped the painter to achieve his purpose of conveying human emotion. The genderless face in the foreground of the painting helped to keep the viewers eyes from getting lost in the swirling background. However, I still need to work on analyzing written rhetoric. For example, in my post Health Insurance In America, I had difficulty understanding the author's purpose and how he used rhetoric to get his point across (although to be honest, I didn't really understand the point of the article in the first place, because it was from some fancy economist magazine).
     The purpose of the TOW assignments is to help us analyze a variety of texts, both written and visual, to make us better writers as well as readers. I think that I would have benefitted from this assignment more is if we got a little bit more time to work on them during school. Sometimes I waited until the last minute to do my TOWs, and they were not as good as I could have made them. If we had a little bit more time to work on them during class, I feel like they could have been a little bit more sophisticated. Also, it would have been very helpful to get some specific feedback on our posts, this way I would know exactly what I needed to work on to make my posts better.