[3] Rhetorical Analysis Reflection

    The writing process for my rhetorical analysis worked well in some aspects, but could be improved in others. I began the writing process by choosing a speech. The first topic I chose was a speech by Margaret Sanger. I originally chose her speech "The Children's Era", because I am studying human development and this topic interested me. After some research on the topic, I realized that what she believed in changed my perspective on the article, so I decided to change. I'm glad I did research on the history of the speech and the author because that changed my views on the article. After researching some more, I decided to change the speech to Frederick Douglass' The Hypocrisy of America.
     I started writing the paper days in advance. The thing that really worked for me, was meeting with the teacher. I feel like every teacher expects something different, so having her read through my paper and critiquing it helped me see exactly what she wanted. It even gave me confidence in what I wrote about. In the future, I hope to be able to meet with the teacher again to give me more confidence as well as corrections on my writing.
     I didn't procrastinate to the night before it was due, so that was helpful. It gave me time to think about my paper, and work on it more. Every time I read it, I found something new to fix that I didn't see before, so reading it with a few days to fix it really worked for me. I want to carry that into my writing process for future papers.
   

[2] The Importance of Family Narratives

Bruce Feiler of the New York Times wrote, "The most important thing to do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative." The New York Times article explained the importance of family narratives.  According to this article, a happy family will create, refine, and retell family stories. After experimenting strategies and how children cope with different situations, they concluded, "The [children] who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges". These kids were proven to 1. have a stronger sense of self control 2. have a higher self esteem 3. the more successful they felt their families functioned.  After this study, came the terrorist attacks of 9/11. They tested the children again, and the same kids who knew about their families showed resilience.

These are so important qualities for children to have early in their life when building a foundation for themselves. It is interesting it comes from knowing about the origin of their family and hearing stories about them. LDS.org also wrote few thoughts on this article. Though mainly summarizing the previous article, the thoughts on lds.org also added ideas giving more hope. I love that they emphasize the importance of the stories to be journeys of trials and hardship, but how it is equally (if not more) important to result the stories with overcoming the trial and having a rewarding outcome. This point reminds me of my family stories, and I love that! This life is supposed to be hard, but we have been blessed with ancestors and family members with amazing lives to learn from. We will be asked to do hard things in this life, but we can do hard things, and that is what I think family narratives are all about. 

[1] Things As They Really Are

In 1899 the US Patent Office closed down because everyone thought that everything there was that could be invented already had... It has since been opened. The internet was invented, and the world has been exponentially increasing the manufacturing and inventing of technology.
We live in a world with technology everywhere. In fact, it's hard for this generation to imagine a life without it! Although, this can sometimes cause problems with wasting time, and not getting good things out of it.
Elder David A. Bednar spoke of the importance to realize the true things in life that matter in Things As They Really Are. He talked about the importance of coming to Earth and gaining a body. He talked about how important it is for us at this time to not fall idle to the hype of social media. It is important for us to use social media and the internet for good and spreading the gospel. He shared a statistic that I found quite amusing, "More than a quarter of gamers [who responded indicated that] the emotional highlight of the past week occurred in a computer world." Some people have forgotten how to feel happy and excited about things outside of the computer screen.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all sorts of social media don't matter in the long run. Elder Bednar said, "To be 'encircled about in the arms of his love' will be a real and not a virtual experience."