Blog Assignment 5

I have always thought that my personality does come out through my writing, because a lot of the time I get very passionate about what I am writing about so that my audience knows that I am really trying to catch their attention. In most cases, this would be called ethos because through my writing my character is being depicted and the audience is going to have to decide whether or not I am credible. If my credibility falls through then there is no paper because to the audience the words are empty, and that does nothing for anybody. If it does not mean anything why would people want to even take the time to read something that does not benefit them?
I feel like my writing helps me get some points across that I never even knew I had. In each writing assignment, the topics were always about something that I never put too much thought into until the assignment sheet came up. Through writing a person can find so much passion that they didn’t even know existed until it is time to start writing thoughts down. In a paper I did over sexting, I found so much passion that I never knew I had because sexting was not something I really thought about. As I did all the necessary research about sexting, I realized that sexting is becoming a bigger problem than many know it is. In my paper, I stated that teens need to be educated so that the number of sexting cases can be reduced and the teens will know that there are consequences that they would not want to deal with. All my research led me to make a conclusion that still held common ground, but offered a solution. In doing this I built up my ethos because I was able to keep that common ground, which keeps everything fair.
Writing this semester made me realize that having an ethos can actually make it a lot easier to find common ground with most arguments. In another paper, I wrote about people not really knowing what healthy eating is. In order to make a credible ethos for myself I had to show my audience that I too belong in the group of people who do not know how to put together a healthy meal. In doing this I showed that one side of my argument was understood, but I still had to show the other side was understood. I did this by saying that I would not being educated in healthy eating, which is proved by the fact that I went and found other sources to get behind both sides. This ensured that I was being fair to each side and not playing favorites.
I think my writing has come a long way because I have learned to make a topic my own even if I know nothing about it. I feel like I had to learn that although the topic might not be of my choosing, the words that are written are of my choosing because they describe me. First coming into the class, I knew that the type of person you are ties into your writing, but I had no clue that writing ties into the type of person you are, which again gives another explanation of ethos. As the class went by, I realized that my ethos is how I become a better writer because it starts with believing in yourself so that others believe in you.