Jonathan Pawlowicz
English 250
5 May 2017
It’s safe to say nobody’s perfect and I am definitely slacking in my written, oral, visual, and electronic communication modes. Within the WOVE modes, I have found written to be my weakest area and oral to be my strongest area. For my rhetorical aspects, I can stay with certainty that my weakest portion is context. This needs to change, and I hope to change that by asking for the help of my friends and by keeping in mind my weaknesses when I write. With these steps, I hope to becoming a better writer and presenter.
WOVE stands for written, oral, visual, and electronic. The acronym was made so that english teachers could save their breath and say the whole thing, as written, oral, visual, and electronic seems much longer to say than WOVE. I believe that my biggest strength is the oral portion. While I am not the biggest fan of papers, I definitely can enjoy or appreciate a presentation more. It allows for body language and excitement towards the topic at hand pull weight where the paper left off. With that in mind, my weakest portion is the written mode. I can write an essay but I do not like to like I can enjoy presentations. On top of that, years of returned papers with bad grades on them have shown me that writing is not my strong-suit, it was what I believe to be the first pointer that proved that I should be an Engineer. With that in mind I believe that my weakest rhetorical aspect is context. I say this because my papers sometimes end up having a significant amount of “fluff”. I have written before with the only goal in mind being to hit the word count. Firstly that’s bad practice, and secondly it means that a lot of useless information ends up being handed to the reader that doesn’t support the progression of the paper. These are all issues that need to be taken care of. To fix this issue, my plan is to read more. Reading is amazing for the brain and I believe that it help my writing in the same way that full immersion trips into other countries help you learn a language. My weakest portion of WOVE modes of communication is writing so I see reading other peoples writing as a way to allow me to catch on to writing techniques that they use in their own writing. I find this the best and most realistic plan because I already lightly read on occasion. By stepping up and making this a daily routine I believe my writing will progress in the long run, and let’s be honest I’m more willing to read a book than write one. This plan is very easy to get support from my friends and family because they will allow me to stay motivated to keep up on reading.
In the long run, I believe that creating a daily habit of reading will increase my skills throughout all my modes of communication with a specific emphasis on my writing. Reading will allow me identify writing styles in other writers that I can use to learn my own style and grow it. Reading will also strengthen my oral skills, because I won’t be able to keep my mouth shut over how great a book is. This will also support my weakest rhetorical aspect, context, because reading non-fiction will allow me to build connections to new ideas to allow for more substantial information instead of unnecessary “fluff”. With this realistic plan, I hope to do what my grandpa always tells me to do, “Learn all you can, and can all you learn.”