Reflection

My genre was science fiction books and I was able to analyze certain characteristics found in these types of books. One of the things they all had in common was the rhetorical appeal of pathos. All of the authors, in their own way, tried to emotionally appeal or connect the reader to the main character with sympathy or other ways. Another similarity is that most of them occur in a futuristic setting, as in years ahead of the present time. For example, The Martian took place in 2035 and Ender’s Game takes place in 2086 which is 100 years after the book was published. Another similar trait they all had was the aspect of warfare. In Ender’s Game the whole plot revolves around making suitable commanders at a young age for war against an alien species. In The Hunger Games the story takes place in a futuristic North America called “Panem” and its government was established due to a huge war between the government and a past rebellion. And lastly, another sci-fi trait is the innovation of science/technology. This can be seen in The Martian because the story is about astronauts who are on Mars, something that hasn’t been done by humans yet. Some things I learned about my topic is that the first ever science fiction book was made in the second century and was called A True Story by the Syrian satirist Lucian. It included other extraterrestrial lifeforms and other universes which is what science fiction is mainly about. I also learned that the rhetorical appeal of pathos is used in all sci-fi books, something I had never noticed. Some things I still want to learn about sci-fi is how it was many years ago. Recent books mainly revolve around space and later years in the future but what about books from the 20th century ? Did they think about certain futuristic things that could happen in our time ? For example, in the Back to the Future movie, it included travelling to the year 2015 where it included self-lacing shoes, something that did not turn into a big thing until this year. Certain things like this make me wonder if science-fiction is just are way of perceiving things that we hope may or may not happen in our own future. 

Throughout this assignment, based on my first draft and the peer review, I learned that at the beginning I was not analyzing the sources in a correct way. This lead to me getting better at analyzing the sources and more importantly showing evidence for my claims on my rhetorical analysis. My strengths as a writer are just being able to understand what the author’s message is or their claim. For example, when coming up with the claims for Flowers for Algernon, it was easy for me to identify because it was just the message that I got and what the author was trying to portray to me. What I feel I need to work on is being able to identify evidence in the sources to support those claims. For example, when I wrote about the author’s claim in The Martian I was able to provide evidence of the book on a certain chapter based off my feelings when I read that specific part. What made this a problem was that I wasn’t sure if any other person reading the book would feel the same way, leading to a different effect. In order to work on this, I guess I would have to practice on finding evidence to support any type of claim.