This week’s classes marked the beginning of
my second semester at college and the beginning of my blog. My name is Joe
Illsley and I am a freshman at Clemson University. I am currently studying
Economics and Spanish, and I am a brother of Sigma Pi Fraternity. For the seven
years prior to my new life as a college student, I called Ridgewood, New Jersey
my home. However, my true hometown is across the pond in Nottinghamshire,
England where I was born and where my family has lived for as long as can be
remembered. To my family and friends still in England, I am an author. I share
with them, both in text (for which Facebook and other social media has proved
to be an extremely effective median) and in person, telling of a new place and
a new way of life. In school, I am an author. I write lab reports, literary analyses,
research papers, and a plenty of other works to display my thoughts or findings
in a persuasion, or rhetoric. Online, I
am an author. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, I learned this week, are all
forms of authoring. One does not have to be on the NY Times’ bestseller list to
be considered an author. As humans, we are hardwired to communicate, and so we
naturally look to gather information and develop a response. We are all taught
at a young age in school how to write persuasive essays. This skill is
constantly stressed throughout all of our schooling because the ability to
effectively communicate ideas is imperative to almost every field. Informal
forms of expression can be just as influential. The internet is a vast network
of people who can connect to one another, and therefore proves to be a means
for change in the world. I am excited to see how my writing will develop
throughout this blog as we learn a greater understanding of the rhetoric and
gain different perspectives in our readings.
