The Outline

In this last for English 1010 we were to write about the necessary steps need to write an essay. It should be clear enough for a novice to be able to write an essay built on the instructions from our own essay.
In my own essay I begin by explaining how I think of the format of an essay is similar to that of a sandwich. I then explain that for any writing done, it is good to have background knowledge on the topic. as well as investigating more to add meat to your essay. After which we have all of our information we want to share with our audience, we then need to put it in the correct format. After the meat, mayonnaise, lettuce, etc. is added to your essay it is then time to add the top layer of bread. In your first paragraph your going to give any background knowledge necessary for your audience to understand, as well as you will be stating your thesis in this paragraph.
Last you will add the bottom piece of bread to your essay. Make sure your last paragraph is strong in supporting all of the elements of your sandwich above. Here you will summarize your essay as well as add a call to action if the writer finds it important. You will also want to bring your thesis down and tie it all together.

What I feel is important

Through out this course we have learned a lot of important rhetorical tools to use in our writing. But one or two in particular are more important to me.  Using description is very important in writing. Describing details helps paint a picture in our readers minds. For example, If your trying to describe an elephant to someone who has never even heard of the animal before your going to describe it using a lot more than its big, kind of round, grey and has a long trunk for a nose. No, you need to to go into depth and use specific details. It can be challenging, we learned this in our description essay. It is a lot of work to describe every little thing, but sometimes it is necessary for a certain audience because we all have different amounts of background knowledge. Visual Rhetoric is a very useful tool me. Everyone learns differently, some people can learn from simply reading, others learn by hands on, I learn from visuals like pictures. There is a saying that a picture says more than a thousand words. Its true. A picture sends a strong message to anyone. Most images are universal, meaning that if you were to take a picture of an adult crying, any person around the world would be able to relate to the emotion and message of the photo. When writing using visual rhetoric and description will help give your message a greater meaning.

Making of the Sandwich

Writing is an art, which is worked on through out an individual’s life. Writing can be referred to as a sandwich. When making a masterpiece sandwich, you start with the bread, this is typical for every sandwich, and then you add ham, tomatoes, and pickles, everything that you can imagine for a delicious sandwich. Every single part is important to the flavor of your creation. To write an essay you need to have something to discuss about, you need to decide what kind of sandwich you want to make. You need a subject that has some sort of importance to you the writer. It is good to have background knowledge to be able to start an outline with basic knowledge.  Next step for your sandwich you need to look in the fridge and pull out every thing you want to add. For an essay this can be Brain-storming. Brain-storming is an important process where you should write down everything you know about the subject of your choice.  Your not writing the essay yet so feel free to write down everything that comes to mind! Next you will want to look at your list of points for your topic. Begin to pull out the main/important points that you want to explain more in depth.  These points we be the meat, lettuce, and tomatoes of your essay.  Organize your points, and research them to add support to your points. Be able to know your points well enough to describe each in great detail. Details are important!  Once you have the order of each, then begin to form you thesis statement. After which you’ll begin to introduce your topic in the first paragraph.  Here you’ll want to add your thesis to help your audience know what the author’s stance on the subject is.  Last your going to finish your sandwich by compacting all the elements together. In your last paragraph, summarize your points and decide what your last message is to your audience. This is the part where you want to make clear what you are trying to convey to your audience. 

classification and their divisions

Classifications become very useful when writing essays. They are the big overall topic of each individual section. These classifications can be broken down into sub categories that we class divisions. The break off from the classification and each add to the support of the classification.  In the essay that we just read for class.  Each classification was set with a heading. There was an intro- which set up the background. Definitions- which had 3divisions under it. Issues and contrast rhetoric with 4 divisions. It then wrapped everything up with a conclusion. We can use this pattern to help us separate the articles we are using to write our essays. after we separate the classifications, we can then dig into the meat and find the sub categories (divisions) to explain in our essay.

New York Times Definitons

The earth has gone through a number of warming phases. Where the temperature rises above the normal average. Clear back in the prehistoric days, before mankind was even recognized, there was a major warming phase in the earth’s history.  A warming phase can occur from numerous causes. The sun has cycles that can exert extra amounts of heat. This can cause an the earth to heat quickly. warming caused by man kind has been a very large global debate. This debate is over the emission of green house gasses. These gasses like carbon dioxide received the name as a green house gas due to their response in the atmosphere. They allow the suns rays to enter into earth's atmosphere, but when the rays try to escape back into space, the gasses hold them in causing the earth to warm. Man kind releases huge amounts of gasses into the atmosphere, from factories to cars, we all contribute to the problem.


Adaptation is the species ability to change it’s body form to give it a better chance of survival. If a species can’t adapt, then it is lost to history. Charles Darwin, a well-known English naturalist, called this The Process of Natural Selection. Normally Adaptation takes hundreds to thousands of years to accomplish. Its not a very speedy thing.  Evolution is the genetic change from adaptation.


The Sifrhippus is the modern day horses’ prehistoric relative. This ancient horse species was a lot smaller than today’s horse. In fact, it was about the size of a small house cat. This species lived nearly 56 million years ago! The Sifrhippus was about 12 pounds average weight. It adapted as the climate warmed and the Sifrhippus shrunk in size, each animal then weighed about eight and a half pounds.

The Power of Definitions

Why is it important for us to define things? Its an important part of our communication skills. Every person is at different levels of what they know. How can a rocket scientist come into a class of freshmen and start teaching class about huge equations, things that the mer freshmen had never even hear of. Defining things will help our audiences' understanding grow. When we are writing we should never just assume our audience understands what we know is happening in our story. We also might need to pay attention to words that we use in certain conversations. Like the Professor was talking about with the word "BAD"  or even "SICK".  A group of guys skate boarding my comment on their friends neat skate boarding trick. They might call it sick....which actually means that the trick was really cool. But if their is a parent in the audience or even a doctor, sick has a whole new meaning. Defining the situation is important!

The article that I chose on New York Times is : A Tiny Horse That Got Even Tinier as the Planet Heated Up.  In this article, it talks about how scientist have just come across a study of the Sifrhippus, a prehistoric relative to the horse. Scientists have no more then fossils of this ancient animal, but all of these fossils (ancient bone) are indicating to scientist that these little horses went through adaptation. Adaptation is where a species of animals, over a long period of time, changes to be able to survive in their environment. The same thing happened with this cat-size horse. During the time period this horse species was living, the temperature of the earth was greatly increasing. The horses' bodies (through generations) lost weight and got even smaller. The article then connects this to how the earth is warming again, and connects with will man kind be able to adapt to change in our environment? 

blog 7a

Using subject specific rhetorical terms in our writing is important. They help a great deal especially when writing essays. When I am writing and I have a message  I need to convey. I try and think of specific ways I can use rhetorical devices to help my audience understand what my essay is conveying.

I have really enjoyed what we have been discussing in class. I have learned a lot about visual rhetoric. I knew pictures have power in sending a message to people, but I never realized the extent of how far our society has gone in using this tool. The last assignment  we read all about this. Pictures can be deceiving! Professor talked about our country's recruiting tools. How the images make us think that if we join, we will be doing amazing life saving tasks. He said that this is not always the case. Its good that we are learning these things in class. Understanding this can help us in the future.

Compare and Contrast

We use the tools of compare and contrast on a daily basis. We can even use these tools with out acknowledging it. We can compare and contrast pictures such as the assignment we are doing in class. We can use these tools in life situations like our examples in class of the Powell devastation, or hearing of how the military has affected individuals. We compare and contrast what we watch on television.  We see people who we image are something spectacular, and then we contrast what we see with ourselves. We sometimes compare ourselves to models we see in books, t.v., magazines, and the internet. Most of these images, I believe, are photoshopped.  This example of compare and contrast can hurt a person's self esteem.

In class we talked about point by point. I find this really useful for me to go one point at a time for each argument. This helps me see the similarities and differences of both sides of what I am comparing. In this last essay we read about the spider, the teacher talked about using a Venn Diagram. This tool I learned clear back early in Elementary,  yet I still use this to get a visual in my head of the differences and similarities. This can be a helpful tool when we are writing our upcoming essay. We can draw two overlaying two circles and write specific points that support each argument in the different circles. In the middle overlaying section,  we write out the similarities.  This creates a visual which can help us organize our upcoming essay draft.

The Gaze

Today in class we discussed the concept of the visual gaze.  Now understanding what it is, I realize how important these rhetorical gazes are in writing. If you want your message in your writing to connect with the readers, you need to pull out a certain gaze that your audience has experienced.  A good example: right now in our country, tension is fairly high about the upcoming election. But when a picture of the flag or a bald eagle is present, we all connect through this gaze! This picture brings our country together and makes us stronger.    





In class we named a couple of different gazes which include, the consumer gaze, the traveling gaze, the religious gaze, and also the cultural gaze.  Im sure there are many more different kinds as well. I like Prof. Marchant's example of Romeo and Juliet. This was a good example of the cultural gaze. They have made different movies with different settings, but they all have the same plot of Romeo and Juliet. The producers hopes for these shows is that the viewers will be able to connect easier with movie this way.  It will be very helpful to take these gazes into mind as we prepare for our next writing assignment.

The Cause and Effect

Today I thoroughly enjoyed discussing cause and effect in class. The cause and effect occurs in all stories, it happens in our daily lives! because of our actions, or even lack of, we have outcomes/ effects. An example is our essay we are writing in class, we work hard correcting the essay and polishing it, in hopes that the effect will be a good score.  in our writings, using this tool will help the reader understand the story better. Quite often like in a movie, we can tell what the effect is going to be from the cause, before it actually happens. we connect with the stories and movies this way.
The Professor really made this concept really click for me when he gave us his example of The Ticket.  Its amazing how far back he can link all the causes and effects from the car reck clear to him speeding to get to  the hospital. We can use this tool for any story or life event that occurs. Until today, I never realized how much of our lives are filled with cause and effect situations.

Peer Review

I think peer review is very important especially when it comes to essays! I think it is great to get a second or even third view on your story. It helps me to understand what works and makes sense, and what doesn't. This last review really helped me strengthen my story.
 Its neat being a peer reviewer. Today I was in a group with two other individuals whom I had no idea of anything about them. Reading these stories gives me glimpse of who they are.  I am able to connect with others in the class by their experiences. Its neat!

rhetorical tools

In the Narrative Structure we read, Mary Frances Zambreno makes a number of good points that are used even in current narratives today.  One of my favorite things that Mary mentions, and we even discussed in class was use of a gap.  I love story lines that make the reader think and dig deep into the story.  These gaps in the story can often leave an unsettling feeling for the reader, its these times we don't know what is happening with the characters. Examples of this are even seen in movies like Harry Potter (which we discussed in class) in the end we don't know what happens in those 14 years after school, but we can make small assumptions based on what see the 14 years later.
Another thing I noticed was how Mary was able to tie in her points with actual quotes from the stories she is talking about such as Aurthor and the  knights at the round table. When she does this it makes her points so much stronger then standing alone. We discussed in class of why these stories that Mary is talking about are repeated so often. Repetition itself is a rhetorical device, people and an audience are more likely  to remember certain quotes or events when things  are repeated. 

Narrative explanation

Today in class we learned the essential elements of a narrative. We learned about different tools that can be used to help elaborate the story.  The tool that stuck out to me the most was flash-backs, and looking forward towards the future. Flash-backs allow the readers to be able to learn more information about what the author is trying to get across in the message. Looking toward the future will allow the reader to understand the authors goals and what they are wanting to accomplish and how they will get there.

I love the tv show The Good Guys. In this show it is about two cops in Dallas, Texas who stumble upon crime cases. The director added in a lot of flash backs to help the viewers understand what is happening. In the show when the characters (i.e. the detective, and sergeant Stark) stumble upon a case, the screen freezes and says something like "six hours before" and then it shows the criminals in their act before the cops come. Then there is a fast forwarding transition back to the present where the two characters are trying to figure out what took place. Flash-backs are a creative way to help the audience understand more detailed information.