El Primero

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.