Melissa Kimball: Five Major Concepts

The five major concepts of this class are analyzing, producing, designing, assessing, and editing. Reading is important for classes and day-to-day living. By reading, you learn. The next step to reading, however, is analyzing. When you analyze something, you pick apart the text. You gain a deeper understanding of the topic by gaining a deeper understanding of the text itself. In this class, the topic just so happened to be about producing and designing, so, of course, analyzing was a very important step in learning this. Producing is, obviously, producing a text—whether that is a paragraph, and essay, an image, or a video, it doesn’t matter. As we learned, though, producing a text isn’t as simple as slapping words on a page. We learned about exigence and rhetoric so that we could communicate more efficiently and more powerfully. Design is the second step to producing. We learned that design can make or break a text. If you found a problem and found something to say about it, you then have to decide how to say it. This is where the words/image/video thing comes into play. Of course, it’s ever more complex than that, and we learned that even a social media post works differently across the different platforms. How and where you say it are key. Assessing, I think, is very similar to analyzing. Once you’ve said what you’ve had to say, others will view it and automatically assess it. They decide whether it is right or wrong, true or false. Their reaction to one text sparks the production and design of your other texts. If you didn’t communicate effectively, you change how or what you’ve said so that you eventually will. This is the editing portion. All five major concepts form a cycle that can be applied to everyday living. This cycle is an understated form of typical, normal conversations. We come into contact with this cycle every day, and most probably don’t even realize it.