As a new student at the University of Texas at El Paso, I was not sure what Rhetoric and

Writing Studies was. Like most of my other peers, I assumed it was simply another boring
English class. My RWS course has opened my mind about rhetoric and how it is used in
everyday life. Whether it is a post on facebook, or an emotionally driven document to end
police brutality, rhetoric can be moving and mean everything, or it can be jittery nonsense and
mean nothing. Rhetoric gives humans a way of communicating, from simple conversation to
organizing and designing a complex sky scraper, rhetoric is there for all aspects.
We primarily focused on an inquiry into our individual disciplinarities and used rhetoric
to analyze data we took into consideration and effectively communicate our discoveries with
the appropriate audience. I benefited from this semester long project because if it was not for a
grade, I more than likely would not have explored my discipline on my own. What was also
helpful, is that we were required to not only conduct secondary research, like online research,
but first hand research like interviews and site observations. I was able to get a grasp on the
culture of the academy after attending a few events and networking with members of different
related clubs and organizations.
An important concept I learned this year about writing not just a research paper but any
document in any particular setting, is that you need to understand the purpose for writing that
specific document. One very universal and obvious purpose might be to get an A, or another to
inform the audience on a specific issue. It is important to understand the purpose so that you
can have a direction to go and stay on track.

Another important concept I learned this year about writing a document is that you
need to understand who your audience is and keep that in mind throughout the process.
Throughout my semester inquiry on the disciplinarity of accounting, I did not account for who
the audience was as I wrote the first draft of my research paper. The audience was intended to
be incoming freshmen who also want to know more about my discipline, so I had to assume the
audience knew nothing about the project, about the course, about the discipline, etc.
The most important concept I took from this course is finally understanding that writing
any document is a messy, recurring process. It does not have to be perfect the first time, nor
will it ever really be, and you do not need to start a paper from the top and work to the bottom.
It is about putting your ideas on paper so you can visually see them, and rearranging from
there. On my first couple of assignments in the semester I had the old view of writing, starting
from top to bottom and trying to make it perfect the first try, but as I wrote my final research
paper, I made it messy and made sure I wrote down any and all ideas I had on the subject.