To clarify beforehand, we prioritized rhetoric in our class. Rhetoric is simply defined as using language to persuade a certain audience. It's different than merely just a motivational speech, because it's discourse that actually has a means to change and have a real impact. The The audience is often ones that could actually go out and execute what the discourse is about. For example, Greta Thunberg often uses rhetoric to spark change. She utilizes several methods like pathos, ethos, and logos to an audience that often actually has the means of change. For this same reason, rhetoric was very important throughout our course and I'll mention it numerous times in the rest of the ePortfolio.
Definition
Generating inquiry means to think about what some language/writing means and gets us to break topics down. This skill was mainly applied to things like rhetoric or how discourse is proposed in our class; for example, what are rhetoric's intentions and what can you learn from it?
Finding Artifacts
The first two weeks had multiple assignments that forced us to generate inquiry such as both QQCs (Quote, Question, Comment). These literally made us as a think about and reason about how rhetoric works. Other assignments like the readings in this area understand its use cases in a a lot of real life events/discourse. For example, the Gretta Thunberg article from earlier. The UWC (University Writing Center) meetings also helped think about our goals as a writer and what our research question would be. They had specific questions that made us guided us on what the parts are, broke down the process, and created goals for the research project. Another artifact is the , because it directly asks us what the research project means. This artifact did really good in asking persistent questions that got me thinking about every detail rather than just a summary of sources.
Best Artifacts
The two best artifacts are the QQCs and UWC meetings for generating inquiry from the ones I found. These both directly ask questions and force us to think about the content. Again, for the QQCs, it helped us understand this outcome by breaking down rhetoric and meet this outcome by making us ask a question about the readings. It not just asking a simple question, rather reaching for a detailed chain of reasoning as seen by the instructions "This question should not be "what do you think?" Ask a specific question about your quote and/or what you wrote in response to your quote." (QQC 1) For the UWCs, they help us understand and meet this outcome by asking the questions of how to become better writers and reflect about what a topic means.
Summary
As mentioned earlier, this outcome is applicable to a lot of aspects of life. It's really useful since, to be good at any project or task, you need to ask and reason on what to actually do, what is it, and what are the constraints? Since I code, I've been using this almost every day. Every coding task requires context to acknowledge the scope of a problem, utilizes that can help fix it, and how this would affect users. This is one of my favorite outcomes since it is extremely universal and crucial.
