The course’s focus on utilizing a variety of genres to fulfill some purpose puts a new perspective on rhetoric that I haven’t fully fleshed out in my mind. Most interesting to me is how the creator works within the constraints of a genre. I find that creativity can thrive in strict genres because novel methods must be thought up to achieve some purpose while still honoring those limits. In a way, you have to think outside the box to achieve some end within the box. 

The class also emphasized just how broad of a term genre really is. I remember the readers we had in elementary schools that labeled the genre of each story as “fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, comedy, mystery,” which gave me the impression that genre just labels text-based stories. The reality is that genres go far beyond stories and can extend to any piece of work that gets a message across to an audience. This can be a poster, a song, an advertisement, a website, a travel brochure, or any other entity with recognizable constraints. To really convince students such as me who wonder how so much of society employs rhetoric, the course assigned us to perform rhetorical analysis on artifacts within our field and even artifacts we created by ourselves. What I found is that no matter how much you analyze, I’ll see another rhetorical strategy that contributes to the work’s purpose. Rhetorical analyses tend to be some of the easiest papers to reach the word count for because the writer can always analyze further. Such minute details as font, spacing, color all leave an impression on the audience and are therefore significant. 

Throughout the course, I also pondered about what psychological concepts could be extracted through rhetorical works. The most common rhetorical strategies must be utilized by many creators because they are effective, so they must have some impact on a person’s thinking. I’m sure research exists on the psychological impact of color for example, but I wonder if further work within rhetorical analysis could lead to important findings in psychology. The idea also related to another course I took this semester, that being Ancient Mythology in the East and West. The class mentions the theories of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two psychoanalysts who could use their psychological concepts to interpret myths, which are literary and rhetorical just like any other work. The fame and significance of these two scholars just goes to show we find a deep interest in story and rhetoric, and society is often built around their ideas through religion, ritual, and values. 

A huge reason why I’ve found so much intersection between psychology and Research, Genre, and Context is due to the emphasis on relating student projects to our chosen majors. I appreciate this aspect of the course, because as I learned to write and analyze, I also learned more about my career path and clarified some ambiguities in my future life. For example, I now realize that I have a deep interest in education, both in relation to how it occurs within the brain and in relation to effective strategies that can be practically implemented in the school setting. More generally, I like to watch growth and skill development. Such important realizations about my life and myself wouldn’t be so clear to me if I hadn’t completed the projects that consist of this class.