About Travis

I’m Travis Rodery, I have one of the most enjoyable, hard-working, and sometimes stressful jobs of being a college student-athlete.  Wayne State University has given me the great opportunity to go to school and also continue to play baseball and keeping my hopes of making it to the next level.  While I am an athlete, being a student comes for it, I take pride in my school work, graduating seventh in my high school class.  Criminal Justice is my major and I plan on attending law school after it is done, so I will be able to enjoy the great city of Detroit for at least seven years.

At the beginning of this of this course, I thought I was reasonably prepared to take on any writing part the class had to offer.  I felt for some reason that my previous writings in high school were far better than the papers I was putting out for this class.  To find out, they were far better than most of the paper I have ever published.  Topic selection was a difficult choice for me because I was used to being given a topic and now I was given the option to choose a topic and not do the same thing as someone else.  My rough drafts started off as basic idea of what I wanted to do with a paper and how I wanted to lay it out.  Eventually, it evolved into basically writing a complete paper and throwing out all the ideas I wanted to do.  I have learned to revise my rough draft and change a lot about it before rewriting a final draft.  We do a lot more revising and peer editing groups so it allows for more feedback to come in and give me ideas for what I should do.  I value bringing in outside personnel and their opinions into my paper to help go along with the point I try to get across.  Bringing in information other than myself, I think, helps make a better and stronger point.  The persuasive tool in ethos, pathos, and logos have confused me and if I understood them better I think it would further improve my writing.  Seeing other examples of the project I work on is a big help, because I can learn from their paper on how to get a point across and what areas to focus on.  I’ve been trying to use the rhetorical situation to my advantage, but I do not feel I understand it well enough.  Picking topics that appeal to audiences, like my Nike Final Draft  project one paper, I think are easier to write on.  Writing about topics close to me like sports, is a really big help and I find it fun and easy to write about.  Sports is a huge topic and can be looked at through many perspectives.  I would like to write to my former teachers in high school to show them that I have gained more tools and have become a better writer.  Since I want to be a lawyer, I can see using the rhetorical situation could come in handy.

Rhetoric, what in the world is this word.  This word can be defined in many ways so it’s not safe to say in just one definition.  Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations.  Also, rhetoric can be said to be the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing.  It typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle’s three persuasive audience appeals, logos, pathos, and ethos. After high school I thought I was an average writer, and then I stepped into Jared’s class and realized I was missing out on a lot of key elements in writing persuasive papers.  I just thought you pick a topic and a side and argue about it, but I was totally wrong.  Three knew things that I learned to include in my paper are ethos, pathos, and logos.  Many people may not know these things, like me at the start of my freshman semester.  Ethos is the ethical appeal, meaning, convincing by the character of the author.  We tend to believe people whom we respect.  You have to make the reader want to listen to you and not just throw out random facts hoping they find it interesting.  Pathos means persuading by appealing to the reader’s emotions. Language choice affects the audience’s emotional response, and emotional appeal can effectively be used to enhance an argument.  Logos means persuading by the use of reasoning.  Used many times by Aristotle, giving reasons is the heart of argumentation, and cannot be emphasized enough.  My experience with these three very important terms has grown over the last couple of months.  In class writing exercises and responses have help a great deal and it has shown through my writing projects.  The thunder domes we would do on every Thursday also helped make my understanding on rhetoric better.  Arguing over gay marriage and other topics, from both sides, made us draw out quality facts and reasons in order to win a case, which my group sadly never won.  Rhetoric is shaping the world and many people do not see it yet.  Public speaking, marketing, lawyers, the list goes on, and they all use this technique of persuasion.  Rhetoric started off small and now has evolved and put into our daily lives.