The process for writing this essay took multiple drafts, peer edits, and analysis. The rhetorical situation is applied throughout the essay, resulting in the successful achievement of course learning outcomes. My thesis for my essay, exploring how a character’s mental illness is developed in a novel, was consistently explored over the entire course of my essay.

The genre of this assignment is an expository essay, due to the fact that an idea was researched and developed with evidence to support my argument. The exigence of this assignment, the “so what” was to further analyze a character’s mental illness through the author’s writing style. By studying Green and DePorte’s different writing mannerisms, I learned new ways to develop a mental illness consistently in a story. The purpose of this assignment was to learn how to analyze writings and be able to read between the lines. Not every author will tell you about a character’s mental illness. While Green was very direct about his character suffering from anxiety, some novels about mental illness do not reveal the struggles that their character fights with. I was able to discover how to develop character traits in a novel in a cohesive manner as well. The audience for this essay is Professor von Uhl. My stance for this essay is that Green sufficiently develops Aza’s anxiety through his book, due to his constant mentioning of her fear of contracting a bacterial infection. The medium of this assignment, an essay on paper, was more connected with the writer and audience when compared to the level of connection from the previous essay. I made my main ideas more clear and developed because I wanted my audience to understand how Green developed Aza’s anxiety (through repetition and imagery). For instance, I included multiple quotes demonstrating repetition and imagery and then I analyzed those quotes in a way that connected the quotes to supporting my thesis. I believe that there was a sufficient connection between the writer, the audience, and the medium.

I am extremely grateful for the numerous peer reviews for this assignment, because they allowed me to achieve multiple course learning outcomes. I developed new strategies for reading, collaborating, and editing. For example, I wrote multiple outlines in order to structure my essay in a more organized manner. I explored new rhetorical situations, focusing on my audience more in this essay and making my content more efficient for them to read. Another course learning outcome that I achieved was citation. I correctly learned the difference between using quotes or italics when mentioning the title of a piece of literature and how to cite quotes directly from a text in a correct form. For this assignment, I implemented numerous strategies such as summary, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation. As I wrote my essay I made sure to continuously check the guidelines so that I was able to meet every requirement. This included the use of multiple transitions between different points of analysis.

Overall, I believe the grade for my essay will be around a B+ because I created and developed a thesis throughout my entire essay, used fluid transitions, and analyzed quotes. However, I believe that I could have developed my analysis of quotes at a higher level and developed my rhetorical situation further. This essay allowed me to explore the different conventional standards of writing and that there are multiple patterns of expression.