TOW Reflection

A noticeable trend in my TOWs is the shorter summaries. In the earlier TOWs, the summary of each article was rather lengthy, totaling about 8-10 sentences. However, the summary of my more recent TOWs has been cut down to about 4-5 sentences. In addition, my more recent TOWs pertain to the hot issues of today. The more recent articles have been on issues that spark many debates, such as abortion, North Korea's nuclear threat, and relationships between students and teachers. Whereas my earlier TOWs focused largely on scientific breakthroughs or interesting health articles, I took a larger focus on global issues and the back-stories behind the hottest news of the day on my latest TOWs. For example, I read an article that was not seen often in the news; the Cleveland police department's failure to rescue the kidnapped girls earlier. Rather than focusing on news exclusively in the United States, I also read some articles on foreign nations, such as Peru and North Korea. This interest in the affairs of foreign nations arose after studying more recent history in APUSH. As much globalization occurred in the late 20th century and I studied this extensively in class, it allowed me to foster an interest for not only what happens in America, but also the events in other countries.

While reading many articles and novels and analyzing picture documents, I mastered spotting rhetorical devices. Even while skimming through a text, I am able to determine and point out specific rhetorical devices that the author used, such as subtle ethos or explicit parallelism. Because of the wide variety of documents I analyzed both in class and through TOWs, my eye for rhetorical devices has been very well sharpened and put to good use.

Every author has a specific intended audience for the article. Although a wide variety of people may read it, the author targets a specific group. However, determining the targeted audience is difficult. It is easy for me to believe that the author wrote the article for the general public, but every author has an audience that he wishes to strongly impact. Now determining exactly who that audience is, is a task that I am attempting to master.

It is impossible to cover every single article of every single genre in class. In order to create a sense of responsibility as well, TOWs are assigned to broaden the scope of our knowledge. The articles we chose to read and the pictures we chose to analyze benefit us with a wider exposure to many different genres and topics. Although the intended meaning was not necessarily this, TOWs are also extremely beneficial to the SATs, as many of the articles we read can be easily used as examples to supplement our argument. In addition, the TOWs also allow us to analyze more in-depth and spot and identify rhetorical devices easily and quickly. Time is precious, especially during the AP exam, and our weekly practice of analyzing gives us needed practice. Also, the requirement of a TOW on a picture document  is very helpful. The synthesis essay in the AP exam almost always has a picture or graph as one of the sources, and our exposure to analyzing pictures in many different ways allows us to identify the author's purpose for using a specific color, specific positioning, etc.

These TOW assignments benefited me in that I was exposed to a wide array of news. I learned information that I would previously not have purposely sought out. I also learned many new rhetorical devices, as well as gained further knowledge on how authors strategically use them to achieve a purpose. However, the fact that I have the freedom to choose articles is also a downside. As I usually choose articles that interest me, I seem to remain in the genre that I am most interested in. For example, I don't really follow basketball or football, so none of my articles were on sports. I would have gained an even wider range of knowledge if different topics were assigned for me to research and write about.