Hello, my name is Nour Ghamrawi, I am 19 years old and currently a sophomore at Wayne State University. I am currently in the process of completing my third semester and I plan on majoring in Pharmacy. In a way my major is a representation of who I am and how I am. I am an individual who likes to learn new things everyday as well be as fair as I can while helping as many people possible. I believe that becoming a pharmacist will allow me to pursue my interest as an avid learner, as well as give me an opportunity to assist those in need all around the world. I was born in Tripoli, Lebanon and when I was about a year old my family and I moved to Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
When I’m not at school or working, I like to spend my spare time in many different ways. First and foremost is with my family. It took me a while to learn but I finally got it, your family is the only group of people that no matter what will always be there for you. When the family is busy I love playing all sorts of stuff, preferably soccer since I’m a great player. Aside from the family and sports I love going out with some friends to just hangout and pretty much do whatever.
My previous writing history has been all over the place. Before high school I was told that all aspects of my writing were exceptional and that I should keep it up. When going into ninth grade I was really looking forward to successfully completing English with a high mark. It didn’t go that way, my teacher seemed to hate each and every piece of work I submitted to her. Lucky for me tenth grade consisted of an English class that reminded me of a zoo. After being discouraged the year before I had no motivation whatsoever to write and that year I didn’t need to. In my two final years of high school I decided to pull up my socks as those were the more important years, the better I did the better chance I had at getting into the university of my choice. I took English a lot more seriously, I began to write about topics that actually meant something to me. This made me much more interested in my work and because of this I began to create good quality papers.
In the summer after enrolling in English 1020 I decided that I was going to take my writing as serious as possible. I opened up a few higher level books and began reading them to try and expand my vocabulary. I thought I was well prepared for English 1020, however it was just the beginning for a different way of writing. The course had so much more to it than just getting a topic and writing about it. We were taught several components to writing such as how to develop thesis, rhetoric, paragraph structure, fallacies and much more. It wasn’t the simple five paragraph structure essay that began with a thesis statement in which you were limited to three points to make your argument. In this class you have more knowledge to work with and you are given more freedom. Picking your own topic was one of my favorite parts of this class. When I was younger my family and I went through a hardship that was extremely unfair and left us almost homeless. Ever since then I try to be as fair as possible, in every aspect of life. This made choosing my topics easy because it gave me a way to express how I felt about controversial topics and I was able to support what was most fair.
Usually when writing a paper I would open up Word and instantly begin writing. The way I began to approach projects in 1020 is to find as much background information as possible and then start brainstorming on a piece of paper. After going through those processes I began to write, I found that my ideas flowed a lot better and the writing was more natural. Throughout the writing processes I learned that revision is one of the most important tools for writing a good paper. Reading it aloud and having it read by a peer were both very important in perfecting my papers. There are a lot of things the writer misses when editing their own work and I learned that after getting back my first peer review. With the general theme of “fair” in mind I picked my topics accordingly, my first paper was about Real Beauty. It described what the media portrayed “beautiful” to be and what it actually was. For this project I went through a key revision before my final draft. My peer claimed that the paper began with an opening paragraph that was very dull and seemed to lack purpose and exigency. Before the revision this is what I had, “Consumers are flooded by fake beauty, and it is ruining everything. Dove is here to fix things and set things straight and support real beauty!” After the revision this is what I had, “Every day you see women displayed on billboards, in magazines, in commercials, and all over the internet. The purpose of all these advertisements is to demonstrate what it takes and what it looks like to be beautiful. However, what we as consumers believe to be beautiful is not as it seems, this image affects everyone and is ruining lives. Dove is here to change that, here to set things right, and support real beauty.” Another example pertaining to revisions is within project five. In this paper I had potentially set myself up into a fallacy. Before the revision this is what the sentence looked like, “Is the right of one to smoke more important than the right of another to live?” After the revision the sentence was restructured, “Does the right to smoke and private property rights overrule the rights to good health?”
In regards to rhetoric, I absolutely had no idea what it was prior to this class. I wasn’t the only one, a majority of the class had no clue what it was. However in reality we all knew what it was and have all came into contact with it one way or another, we just never recognized it. Honestly speaking I showed up late to the first class in which rhetoric was discussed and I thought it was the name of some famous scholar. After learning about rhetoric, my understanding of it is that rhetoric is the ability to use language in order to convince someone to change their point of view or persuade someone to take a particular action. After understanding rhetoric it becomes clear that it is used as part of our everyday society. Some use it in advertising, some use it in courts, and some people use it mischievously. Rhetoric is an excellent tool to have, and using it properly truly gives you an edge. With a great skill such as rhetoric comes great responsibility. Rhetoric can be used in a manipulative way to benefit an individual, I believe this is wrong. Rhetoric is a great tool and should not be put to waste by being used wrongly, it should be used to mutually better ourselves and those around us.
So cool.
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