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Jason Bradley
Professor Debs
Capstone ENGL 5095
April 23, 2015
Critical Essay
Reflecting on my education in the Rhetoric and Professional Writing program at UC, I
feel that I have grown across many areas. I have learned about rhetoric, both as theory and as
practice. I have learned to use multiple digital platforms and software to produce professional
content. And I have learned how to approach and engage with ethical considerations in the field.
I have learned to create texts for a specific purpose or a specific client, and I have learned to
create documents that intentionally and appropriately address a given audience.
Foundational to my progress in the RPW program is a solid understanding of rhetoric.
When I began the RPW track, my understanding of rhetoric was limited. I had only a
rudimentary and conventional sense of rhetoric, and I thought of it primarily as the type of
language that politicians use. Intro to Rhetoric and Professional Writing really helped me to
expand my notion of what rhetoric was. I think that the Rhetorical Document Analysis
assignment was particularly useful in helping me to understand rhetorics pervasiveness and
practice in everyday life. In the assignment I analyze the use of logos, pathos, and ethos in a
middle school grant proposal, and graphically represent the rhetorical triangle.
This assignment was useful in a couple key aspects. First of all it allowed me to look
critically at how the elements of rhetoric function in a real-world professional document.
Because one of the career paths I am most interested in is grant writing, I also think that this
analysis has an enormous practical benefit, and the potential to help me professionally in the near

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future. Secondly, I appreciated the fact that this assignment was written as a professional
document, rather than as an academic report. I understand that in higher education that there will
always be a place for the academic essay, but I really enjoyed the opportunity to practice writing
in the professional format because it helped me increase my familiarity with the conventions of
that style of writing, and makes me feel more confident moving into the workplace.
Another key area of progress for me while in the RPW program was in the use of
different software to produce professional print or digital content. Desktop Publishing was a
great introduction to the Adobe Creative Suite, which is the standard in design software. I came
into the program with a reasonable background in design and some familiarity with the Adobe
line up. Before transferring to UC main campus and the RPW program, I had attended UC Blue
Ash, or UC Raymond Walters College as it was then called. While attending there I took
multiple classes in design and production which covered Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash,
InDesign, Dreamweaver, in addition to audio and web design, on my way to completing an
Animation Certificate. While I enjoyed working in these different software packages, I realized
that I did not want to further pursue an eMedia degree, which prompted my switch to RPW.
Despite my background with such design software, Desktop Publishing was a great way to
improve my skills and produce a portfolio piece.
The Movie Poster assignment was my favorite from the Desktop Publishing class, as it
pulled together most of what we had been learning throughout the semester, and ultimately
resulted in a portfolio quality document. While coming up with ideas and drafting sketches for
the assignment, I got to practice elements of design we had gone over: contrast, repetition,
alignment, and proximity. While I had dealt with design theory before, I appreciated the very
practical approach to design that we took in this course. I produced the movie poster for print

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output in Photoshop, and though I had a high degree of familiarity with Photoshop to begin with,
I improved my skills with techniques that had troubled me in the past, such as transparency
gradients. Additionally, I think that working on a document from beginning to end, going from
document requirements through to finished product, is really valuable in helping to prepare me
for the professional world.
While working through the RPW program I also enjoyed the challenge of considering
ethical issues. On the one hand I think of myself as a fairly conventional and rational person,
which is one reason why I was very interested in professional and technical writing as possible
careers upon entering the program, but I also enjoy engaging with abstract and difficult concepts
as well. I was pleased that the RPW program does a very good job of addressing both the
theoretical and the practical.
I enjoyed all of the esoteric ideas that were dealt with in Intro to English Studies. I
believe that my Literary Essay assignment Repressive Desublimation in Sleeper, demonstrates
how I learned about complicated ethical considerations. Producing the essay required quite a bit
of research by reading works of cultural theory by the likes Marcus, Foucault, and Baudrillard,
which while very challenging, I also very much enjoyed. The crux of my essay is in considering
the representation of repressive desublimation in the movie Sleeper, that is to say, how the effects
of capitalism and technologies of production and reproduction are represented as effecting
society. I found that I really enjoyed the challenge of how many of the concepts embodied in
cultural and literary theory question the status quo, and I would certainly not be familiar with
repressive desublimation or the iron cage if not for this assignment and this course.
Among the most practical and valuable skills I have learned from RPW is how to produce
documents for a specific purpose and a specific audience. The two are closely linked of course,

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but are not the same. The purpose of a document often determines the audience, hence the
purpose of a document must be first and foremost. Considering purpose and audience are
especially important for any type of professional writing, in which case the author is not writing
for his or herself, but rather for a client.
The best experience I gained in producing documents which required careful
consideration of purpose and audience was the Undergraduate Professional Writing Certificate
Campaign I produce for RPW Capstone. This was a team project that I worked on with group
members Jedd Cole, Steven Taggart, and Jordan McKinney. We received fairly sparse directions
for the assignment which consisted of four lines which instructed us to promote the PW
Certificate to primarily non Arts and Sciences undergraduates in any way that would be approved
by UC, such as creating promotional material, a campaign strategy, a social media presence, and
a recommendation report.
Our group worked together to focus these instructions so that we would have a clear
purpose in the production of our content. We ultimately decided it would be best not to cast a
wide net, but rather to focus on a narrower segment of the undergraduate student population,
which would allow us to create a message that would speak more persuasively to that audience.
Having clearly defined the purpose of the assignment, we were then able to select the most
appropriate audience. We researched multiple undergraduate programs and decided that students
in the Lindner College of Business would be the best target audience. These students not only
were more likely to have room in their academic schedules for the addition of a certificate
program, say as opposed to engineering students, but we also saw a unique need for them, as
much of their literature indicated the importance of written communication, yet there seemed to
be an absence of writing classes in their curriculum.

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With a definite purpose and a clearly defined audience, we then conducted audience
research to direct us toward the most effective deliverables. The in-class survey of business
students conducted by Jedd had a direct impact on shaping our campaign. Our decision to focus
on Twitter as our primary channel of communication with our audience came directly out of our
research, as did the selection of specific persuasive arguments. For example, in a social poster I
produced, the decision to use copy which advertises that more money is made by specific
business professionals who make fewer written errors, comes from the overwhelming number of
students that indicated to Jedd that they thought it was a good idea to take writing classes in
order to improve their salaries post graduation.
I found the production of this campaign was invaluable for the experience it gave me
working with my fellow group members to produce a professional multi-document project with a
definite purpose, for a specific audience, which we delivered on time.