One of the writing assignments that I felt less confident in was the rhetorical textual analysis so that was the assignment I decided to revise. Being a shorter essay I had two main points to support the thesis. Of the two points I definitely felt more confident in the one point than the other. My thesis was that the author had fallen short of reaching the target audience which was people who had seen Dunkirk and were confused by the plot. The two reasons I gave the first time around were that the author’s organization of the piece and the lack of deep analysis could lead to confusion for the audience. I kept the first point about organization, as I strongly believe that the layout of the article was confusing even though I had seen and understood the plot of Dunkirk. However I replaced the second reason, as it didn’t make much sense. At the time of writing this piece I knew that a ‘lack of analysis’ on a article that was strictly supposed to be a summary was a stretch, but couldn’t think of anything else. After taking a closer look and spending some time thinking about why the piece just didn’t quite feel right to me, I found a second reason. The author barely has an introduction at all before diving into the complicated plot of the movie which contains no background information whatsoever. This stuck out to me because there are many characters with complex timelines, and there were many times that I had to look up who was who while reading the article. The author should have included some background information on the characters and the setting in order to get this information clearly to the reader to the start. If the reader was confused about who someone was or what was going on it’s likely that they may have just given up and discarded the article.
After revising this assignment I feel much more confident in it. The first time around I had procrastinated and then forced a second point to support the thesis that didn’t really fit. This time around I put in the time that I needed in order to find a two solid support points, which just goes to show how my communication process has improved from then to now.