Assignment 9

As I write my essays I am building relationships with my audience who read my essays. I want my audience see how I care about them and would try to persuade them on why I am writing the way I do. Although my second conference went on well, I felt I needed to maintain my controlling purpose and relate more with my audience.In my second conference which we met as a group, I was a little bit confident compared to my first conference which by then was not very good as I was still having a lot of "commonplace."

I have now learned what I need to do address the challenges going into the second conference.I have also learned to follow instructor's recommendations as I feel they are useful in looking at my essay at different angles.Additionally,the in-class activities including the group and peer interactions have been of tremendous help. For example, in the first essay I realized i fell short in a lot of what I needed to include. It turned out that I was fond of writing using "common place" instead of personalizing the essay. For example in my essay Lifelike, I thought it was an underworld trade just because I had never come across the word "taxidermy" and I backed my assumption with Susan Orlean's quote, "It was usually regarded as almost a black art, a wholly owned subsidiary of witchcraft and voodoo" (Orlean,2).

The instructor wanted me to identify my controlling purpose and writerly choices and expand on them. Her guidelines were helpful as I used and eventually helped me in my essays.So it was after I read Orlean's article that I came to appreciate the work she did and eventually broadened my understanding of what taxidermy is. I also understood Susan Orlean's strategy of writing on taxidermy which not many people write about it. Her strategy becomes clearer when she put it in New Yorker magazine to enlighten people on this profession not many people know. The author wanted us to see taxidermy as a business as well as art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of different animals onto a mannequin for various reasons. Among the writerly choices I picked from this article are:- zoology nerd, stillborn, and PETA.

 I will keep working on my controlling purpose and explain further my writerly choices citing quotations and examples from the essay. I will as well follow the guidelines on DK handbook pages 194-199.