Reflection:

Our rhetorical analysis paper was one of the biggest and toughest assignments we had to conduct for English 400, this Spring semester. We were told by our professor, to choose an artifact what we wanted to analyze and dissect. The artifact I chose was a sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, by Jonathan Edwards. We had to determine what type of rhetorical strategies, which are pathos, ethos, and logos, that were portrayed throughout our artifact. Another thing we had to achieve in our rhetorical analysis was to integrate three or more course concepts that related to our artifact. I had four course concepts mixed in throughout this paper. Those four concepts that related to my artifact were:

1. Vivacity: “a sense of immediacy or presence created through the use of descriptions, imagery, and colorful language that make an idea come alive” (Palczewski 139) Vivacity is portrayed throughout Jonathan Edwards sermon but one example is the  frightening images which he used to persuade his audience into believing they are vulnerable to Gods wrath.
2. Civic Engagement: “people’s participation in individual or collective action to develop solutions to social, economic, and political changes in their communities, states, nations, and world” (Palczewski 16-17) Jonathan portrays civic engagement because he is a man who went out there, created a sermon, which he hoped to give realization of hell and scare people back to their old ways of religion.
3. Ideology: “the ideas, values, beliefs, perceptions, and understandings that are known to members of a society and that guide their behaviors” (Palczewski 28) From the rhetorical analysis this is an example of how I used ideology in the paper: “These are the beliefs in the religion of church that guides us to behave because people do not want to test God and his wrath. Jonathan Edwards uses the Bible verses to back up the sermon he is giving.”
4. Metaphor: “a figure of speech in which two dissimilar things are said to be similar, offering a new perspective on a known issue” (Palczewski 50) A metaphor, given to us by Jonathan Edwards in his sermon was, “the bow of Gods wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string”, which this metaphor was explaining Gods wrath.

This assignment has helped me to learn more about active citizenship because I had to apply the course concepts and strategies that we learned throughout the semester into this rhetorical analysis. I achieved our course learning outcomes, “choose appropriate forms in writing for a variety of purposes” because I had you the appropriate for of MLA for this paper.I also had to conduct the paper accordingly to the MLA format throughout the whole paper not just in the work cites page.