My Life, My Ethos

I'm a complex person. I was always told as a young child that I was more outgoing than most and very argumentative about my personal opinion and position. However, somewhere along the way to the person I am now I lost most of my extraverted nature, but not the argumentative side. Going to college and taking some of the classes that I have taken have really helped me find my sense of self, in other words my ethos. This semester in particular has really helped me become more acquainted with my inner self.

English has never been one of my strong suits, but I've always thought I was a decent enough writer when it came to something I was passionate about. This semester we've done many examples of arguments. This is something I always considered myself very good at because I get into enough arguments to make me more than qualified. But after writing my first official paper entitled Chinese Government and the Fight against the Internet I realized that the position I had taken possibly wasn't what I had expected it would end up being. I attacked Facebook users and myself in the process saying, "Americans live and breathe just so they can get on Facebook and waste their valuable time." I do personally believe that Facebook is a waste of my time, but because I'm essentially addicted I would never don't want to be a member. But each person chooses how they live their life and it's not for me to decide or commentate.

During the Rogerian argument paper the theme of technology and the environment was a little closer to home than the previous paper. My senior year of high school I had gone to an almost completely “green” house that was an obvious reaction to not only rising energy costs but because the owner wanted to give back to the environment she lived in by not wasting its natural resources. The owner had placed in her house “high efficiency toilets, special brick around the house that insulated the house, the attic had foam insulation instead of fiber glass, as well as a specialized water heating system that heated the water quicker that way their family would be less wasteful of water.” If people could be more like this one person who actually cares enough to give back then we would have many less problems in our world. There are people on the other side of the Earth taking care of our wastes and we are subjecting them to dangerous conditions that they should never have to face.

At the very beginning of the semester we analyzed an advertisement to see what the creators were possibly thinking in order to make the advertisement appealing to their target audience. I personally analyzed a trailer from the 1993 movie The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s one of, if not, my favorite movie. It taught me that if we just be ourselves we really don’t need anything more. We don’t the need pizzazz or material goods. Though I have to admit sometimes having the little extra things make life more entertaining we really for more because we can’t be who we’re not.

If this semester has taught me anything it’s that I really need to be passionate about what I write and that when I put my soul into something it needs to be a subject I agree with. I’ve learned so much about myself and my boundaries as a writer and a student this semester that I probably wouldn’t have if hadn’t taken this course. I think I finally know how to properly use my ethos. So in the future if I ever have to write a paper or do a project that questions my ethos I’ll learn from that experience.