Entering the Conversation: Wait? I get to give my opinion?

Throughout high school and middle school I was normally taught how to write essays. First I was taught how to write a paragraph in elementary school. Five sentences and you have a paragraph. Of course that doesn't really matter how many sentences you have. It's just what my teachers taught me when I was younger. As you get older though, in middle school, the teachers think you're so smart now and have you start writing essays! Yippie! I was so not overjoyed with having to write essays with the structure of intro, three paragraph body, and a conclusion. It was the worst. Honestly, I really didn't like writing when I was younger. Maybe it was because of all the structured writing we had to do, really killed my creativity. Although, there were some teachers throughout my schooling that really pushed us as students to expand our creativity through writing. I even had a teacher in middle school named Mr. Myers that created a writing club for our whole class and called us Writers4Life. I never really cared about it but you could see that Mr. Myers cared a lot about his "writers." He even went as far as making pens. Other than that I remember having journal time or time to write whatever we wanted in our journals in my high school classes. I really enjoyed those because I would just come up with a random story in my journal and when our teacher would ask us to share I would read my story out loud and try to make the class laugh it was fun. Also allowed me to see writing more creatively. There were times during journal time that I also got pretty serious about the topic. Where the teacher would ask us a question to respond to and writing it in our journals. I got pretty into it most of the time and it felt like I had an internal dialogue with myself. Me that was thinking in my head and me that was thinking on the paper, it was cool. Towards the end of high school I ended up finding my way to shooting photos and creating a blog where I would write stories and what I learned from these experiences. It allowed me to express myself and get my thoughts out there and for me to share. It was fun and I thought it was really interesting. I also ended up buying a journal towards the end of high school and would use it to write and brainstorm. Basically a notebook where I could write or draw whatever I wanted in it. If you haven't done this before I recommend you do. It's pretty sick looking back at yourself and who you were a year ago to where you are now. It's a thrilling experience. I really enjoyed writing more subjective pieces like blogs it allows me to be more creative and express myself.

Blogs respond to an rhetorical situation because your expressing your thoughts and your ideas. Through those ideas and processes you end up developing a dialog that describes what you're talking about. Which is basically rhetoric. By processing and developing your ideas you're developing a rhetoric for your reader by having them read and process your idea as they read. You're persuading them by guiding them along through you're writing. It's basically all rhetoric.

An op-ed is a page containing article in which people express opinions about things. Op-ed's are mainly used for expressing your opinion to an audience and making it seem like your opinion is fact when it's actually an opinion. I'd consider it an art for when you really think about it. Being able to state your opinion and have people believe your opinion because it sounds factual. Sounds difficult and fun. While op-ed's are interesting sometimes it's hard to appeal to specific audiences due to the biases already implied in the writers opinion. If the reader disagrees with the writer it makes it difficult for the reader to listen to what the writer has to say. Instead they're constantly looking for ways to disprove the writer.

There are also websites online giving tips on how to write Op-eds.