Dave Nuttall
ENG 1010 – 5:30pm
Rhetorical Rationale – Phoenix Unfound
1. Who is the target audience in each of the revised pieces?
In the short story, Phoenix Unfound, the target audience was primarily myself and my family and friends. This paper reflects a true life experience which I had wanted to document for several years and found the perfect opportunity in creating a paper to meet a college writing assignment.
2. What do you hope to accomplish (what is your purpose) in each of the revised pieces?
I wanted to record an account in my own words of the tragic paragliding accident which I had on February 2, 2008 and the subsequent recovery process. I wished to memorialize my experiences to the best of my ability as it was truly one of those defining moments in my life. I guage my life by events which occurred before as well as those which took place after this incident.
3. Describe the revisions you made from first to final drafts and why you made those revisions.
I am the type of writer who will write whatever comes to mind and then follow that up with a continuous analysis and re-writing and adding sequence, building and refining my statements until I am satisfied with them. With this paper, I created the initial story in four pages but then by adding more information which I believed would bring clarity to the story while providing necessary detail, the four pages became nine. The paper was edited by peers and additional suggestions were analyzed and incorporated as I felt appropriate. The edits provided by Professor Bailey were also included although I was excited to see very few changes required from her assessment. I had worked hard to make the paper something I could be proud of. This was easy because it was a paper I was personally committed to.
4. Describe your engagement in peer reviews. How and why are editing sessions helpful?
I enjoyed the editing sessions because it gave me an opportunity to get my head out of my own story for a bit and see the world through someone else’s eyes. The papers I edited were enjoyable and impactful in their own ways. The editing sessions were helpful because there were a few nuances in my own paper that I had struggled to get just right and the additional perspectives helped me find the solutions I needed.
5. Discuss anything else you would like readers of your portfolio to know about your writing or about yourself as a writer.
One of the things I enjoy about writing papers is finding new words to express myself. I enjoy making use of a thesaurus and I truly believe it helps to keep a reader engaged. This helps me to expand my vocabulary and it in turn keeps me interested in my own work too.
I would like to add more to this story for my own purposes but chose not to for this assignment as it was already longer than it was supposed to be. One major part of this story which I did not include involved my cheating death a second time just the day after my accident and surgeries, while I was recovering in the hospital. Due to mistakes made by the staff that day, particularly one nurse, I was actually closer to death in that event than at any other time up to that point. I flew through the lighted tunnel and I will never forget it. It is a story all its own but yet a major part of the original. My wife was not interested in reading my story because of the event in the hospital and it was only after the peer edits had taken place and I was asking her to please just look at it, that she finally did so, finding to her relief that I had not included the event mentioned above. This one is still a fresh wound, four years later.
