Rhetorical Analysis: The Curse Of The Billy Goat

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During my first semester at the University of Alabama I wrote several essay including a response essay, a rhetorical essay, and annotated bibliography and a research essay. Although these assignments each had different objectives, they were all written to work towards reaching the Student Learning Objectives for English 103 that were provided at the beginning of the semester. This semester I worked to further my skills regarding my ability to employ writing strategies appropriate to each assignment’s purpose, locate assignment-appropriate sources from multiple places, and ethically use source material in academic arguments.

My second essay of the year was a rhetorical analysis that looked at an episode of the X-Files titled “Jose Chung’s …show more content…

Our first task was to locate assignment-appropriate sources from multiple places, and create an annotated bibliography from the information gathered. In order to do so I used the university library’s search engine, and as a result I found academics journals, database entries, and websites that could be used. For example, I cited an article from the NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture where I learned about the history of the Chicago Cubs. This information would come in handy because the research project had to summarize the topic, and in order to do so the full history of the Cubs had to be understood. Additionally, I also cited an article from the database Academic OneFile titled “Curse of the Billy Goat: an Adaptive Coping Strategy for Cubs Fans”. This piece “really delve[d] into the social science behind The Curse of the Billy Goat” (Mazon 3). Information regarding the social science that explained the curse was essential to accomplish another goal of the research project, which was to analyze why the topic captured America’s consciousness, which made this source essential to my

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