Well, here we are. The final TOW post. I haven't been here since the beginning, but over the last seventeen posts there was real improvement. Some of the development came through technical skill. Of course I became a writer over the year, and like all students my analytic abilities were honed. However, I think the biggest change isn't one that is immediately apparent by reading the TOWs themselves. The first few required maybe an hour and a half of pre-planning and analysis and then twenty to thirty minutes of writing. By the end, I was spending more time writing than working through the analysis. The TOWs really helped me to see the rhetoric and strategies quicker, a skill also developed during in-class test prep.
While far from being a master, I think this course has really helped me to be familiarized with the different species in the zoo of rhetorical devices. Jargon, diction, and syntax were essentially synonymous to me in the beginning of the year, but now I wouldn't dream of equating them. Of course, there is always room for improvement. One area I think I should like to focus on further in my career of academic rhetorical analysis is deciding on an article. I still have trouble telling between the articles which are rich with very deliberate and important to analyze tactics and those which are actually fairly straight-forward but superficially fit criteria for certain strategies.
Over all, I think that these TOWs have helped me. Perhaps they didn't hugely impact my abilities in the classroom (at least, not nearly as much as the class itself). However, they did help to open my eyes to rampart manipulation in the texts all around us, words or otherwise. I would like to think that the overall purpose of the TOWs is this primarily and scholastic benefit second. Should this turn out to be the case, than I would have to declare these TOWs a rousing success. If not, they were at least occasionally interesting.
