Cordell Taylor

Professor Howard Lytle

RHET 1312
03/08/2016

My project was written with the goal of informing interested readers about the works of Nikola
Tesla, the higher possibilities they indicate, and show how these possibilities have been deliberately
opposed. Using MLA was neutral in terms of effectiveness, but may have made a small ethos
contribution. To me, writing formats do not seem to be important. They do assert the professionalism of
a writer, but the idea of professional is arbitrary and merely a matter of opinion. I used the classical six
part structure early on, but after my original draft I hardly attempted to retain this structure. The research
was difficult for my topic. Information was not abundant to begin with, and having to filter out the noncredible sources left me with little to work with. I finally pieced it together with vigorous fact checking. It
was a slow and tedious process, but prevented me from using inaccurate or misleading information. A
classmate read over my initial draft, but the feedback and suggestions were over things I had already
assessed myself. I was careful about my grammar, punctuation, and spelling from the beginning,
definitely concentrating on grammar and spelling for my final draft. My attention to MLA format was
almost nonexistent. I wrote everything in plain text, and then reformatted everything once I was finished.
One thing I should have done is pay more attention to my works cited page. I just copied and pasted links
to my sources, probably not meeting MLA standards. I learned a lot from this assignment: the importance
of a rhetorical analysis, the importance of fact checking and very thorough research, that bad sources are
much more prevalent than I would have expected. The greatest impact this assignment had was in
developing my ability to see things from a different perspective, and I feel that I am much better at doing
this now than before.