Reflective Letter

As I started Unit Two, I had very little thought put into rhetorical choice, digital media or even my choice of an Audience. When first writing in my English 102 class my main objective was to produce me assignment within the guidelines and focused my audience mainly to the students in class and my instructor. I had a very narrow mind when it came to doing my research and mostly relied on shallow google searches and easily obtained sources. It wasn't until I read the course readings “Let's get Specific”, “The Multiple Media of Text” and “Writing for a Web Audience” that I started to complicate my thinking process when it came to my writing.

After reading Wysoki's model for writing to a web audience I started to really dive deeper into how I researched, especially web sources. I looked at how the pages were being set up and what this said about the author, company, and the overall message of the text. I had not consciously thought through how a website looks in order to directed the reader to certain conclusions. I had however already been drawing conclusions about my sources based how the appearance of their sites subconsciously. By understanding that I was making these observations and conclusions subconsciously I was then able to start consciously dissecting my thought process and analyzing the websites I was using in my research. I believe that this helped me to not only gain more meaningful sources but to also analyze the credibility and purpose of the website more accurately. One source that I was unsure about using was an article from About.com However after reading the article following lateral research methods from unit one, and analyzing the site, I was able to find out a great deal about the author of the article, her credibility and credentials. This method greatly helped me find new sources in unlikely places that provided wonderful information to my research.

After learning how to more accurately and effectively analyze my sources it enabled me to broaden my focus without over complicating or slowing down my research. This broaden focus allowed me to look into different aspects that were involved with the BSU HEP program, and ultimately formulate my research question and guide my research to a narrow and specific area, The Long Term Trends of Disproportional Special Education. Although presented as a single statement this research topic still seems quite broad and vague I was able to complicate my thought process and work through the details that I needed to address in my research by using the Research Draft assignment and the Website Draft questions. Both of these assignments allowed me to write in a fairly informal method what my research was going to be on and how I was going to formulate my argument.

One of the more challenging aspects I found to accomplish while working on my Website Draft was to determine my audience. As I went through my research I was finding mostly academic sources that spoke to the professional educators in Special Education. I wanted to go in a different direction from what most authors in my topic area were focusing. I decided to try and focus my research towards an audience that I felt hasn't previously been addressed in the topic area of Disproportionality, Parents of minority children who face placement in Special Education. At first I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to focus solely on the parents, I tried looking towards both Educators and parents but realized very quickly though analysis of my own website design that these are two very different audience groups and would work against one another. I focused in on parents because while looking through sources I felt that this audience has the littlest support.

I designed disproportionaleducation.weebly.com to be warm and welcoming to parents. I wanted to create a feel that fostered a sense of helping. I worked on my site imagery to create this feeling, using pictures and headings that would draw on the emotions of my audience and help them to connect with my text. I believe that my choice of imagery lay out will speak to my reader just as much as my text will. Yes there of course is more content in a text yet, just as Wysocki pointed out, our use of layout, font form and size and imagery all play a major role in web design.

Throughout my unit two course work I worked very hard to expand my research and challenged what I had perviously known about Special Education and what I was learning through my research. Over coming preconceived ideas that I had about Special Education and minorities populations with in these programs was my goal in picking this research topic and I believe I manage to address the concerns I had within my research and provide an interesting argument that is well delivered inside my website.