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Professor Lynn Raymond

UWRT 1104

18 March 2017

Taylor Patrick

Writing Prompt 7

This semester long project is one that is of great interest to me and I am happy my partner

and I have decided go in depth with a few influential black women that have made their mark on

our culture and society. A lot of the assignments and activities we have done in class have

pushed me to do more research. Surprisingly, the family research I have done has shown me why

it is important to pursue this topic as well. I am curious to see how far this project will take us

and what rabbit holes we will go down along the way.

So far in the semester long project, I believe I have used rhetorical knowledge in a few

important ways. Knowing that this is a college setting, we will try not to bore the audience with a

simple powerpoint that has two colors and basic transitions with someone's fact sheet about the

women thrown onto the slides. We are using a prezi with engaging visual effects and graphics

and also relevant knowledge about our topic other than the general information like their birth

date and one thing they are known for. College students can retain more information that they

relate to or is interesting to them. We will use that information we found and try our best to relate

it to our everyday lives or show them why they are still relevant today. I plan on giving my

audience the necessary information but adding my own personal spin to it by using personal

stories and adding my own personality instead of being monotone and regurgitating the

information on the screen back to the class.There will also be some areas of the presentation
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where things wont be as happy and positive because many of these women have experienced

discrimination and have faced adversity so we will adjust our tones and voice to fit the subject.

Many of the assignments that we do in class push me to find out more about the subject

matter. Especially the writing prompts where I have to do research about my family and ask

them questions. I have learned many things about them and it made me go in depth with the

research Ive done about the women we chose for the project. It made me realize that it is more

out there than just that one popular article and it made me look into their brothers and sisters and

parents of these women and what impact it had, if any, on their life. Seeing how much of an

impact my great aunts and uncles had on each other through the genealogy project questions

made me apply that same process to who we are researching, just in a different way. That is one

of the elements that has caused me to dig deeper into this project. Something else that has pushed

me to want to find out more is the class activity where the class wrote down things they would

like to learn about in our project and they all had such great ideas and it made me want to go

back to my room right after class and research it then. That drove me to research beyond what

we planned on talking about.

Some sources have also made me skeptical about the information found and it has caused

me to throw those sources out. Articles that are titled Top 10 Most Influential Black Women of

Our Time for example are good for a casual read but not for a research project because they

tend to be biased and opinionated because the number one person may have more information

and positive things than number ten. They have good facts but it tends to skim the surface and

leave out details. Another source would of course be the wikipedia articles because they are
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known to be edited and changed by people that may have no idea what they are talking about.

Even though people fact check, many things are still inaccurate.