Choosing a topic for my advocacy essay was the most challenging part for me. It worried me slightly because I ended up asking myself, “honestly, you don’t care about anything at all?” Granted, one of the things I am most passionate about are food issues which I addressed in my previous essay. I realized that it wasn’t so much that I didn’t care about anything, and more that I was comparing my ideas to others in the class. I didn’t want to talk about something “stupid” or “boring.” Overall, this just really weighed on my confidence in my writing. After writing many proposals on a variety of topics I finally settled on discussing president Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize.

    I identified the audience for this essay as all Americans. I could have perhaps made my audience more specific, such as “Americans who are upset that Obama was awarded the Prize” but I feel that this argument encompassed even those who agreed with me. My main goal was to voice my concern based on the reaction of the general public about the award. “Communications aimed at multiple people tell us what the communicators value and how they think the world should be”(CDA 112). I think that this is one of the ways that this assignment is different from ones that I have written in the past. Anyone can write a persuasive essay using any combination of the three rhetorical appeals they desire, but even creative composition does not always inspire change. I think that advocacy works uniquely in this way that differs from pure argument because “we enter the complex web of human conversation”(113). An argument seems much more abrupt. You start what you want your reader to believe and lead them through a series of points as to why they should think or feel a certain way, yet it can still fall short leading the reader to ask: So what? Taking a broader approach with a sense of advocacy might lead the reader so stop, think, and change, rather than only being put on the defensive. Advocacy gives us the power to change the world, rather than just writing to win.

    My peer editors didn’t have much to say about my paper apart from some grammatical corrections.

   

  

     I changed suggested corrections by correcting my verb tense and expanding conjunctions to maintain a formal tone. I received some helpful information in a meeting in your office to improve my first main point. In my first paragraph you suggested that I add something so it didn’t sound like my argument was “winning on a technicality” because I said that since the will didn’t explicitly say that a person must be successful in carrying out their plans to achieve peace, then Obama was deserving. I didn’t give enough support for this point. In my final draft I added a couple sentences to clarify the point I was trying to make.