Good Morning, Afternoon, Evening, or if you are my kind of person, Good Middle of the Night,
Courtesy of an exasperated mother, several irate English professors, a host of annoyed friends, and one very tired librarian, I present to you a young lady who has composed poems on expensive furniture, picked educated brains so clean you could eat off them, edited peers' papers until they bled red ink, and usurped enough of the local library's electricity to make a sniveling environmentalist gasp in horror.
My name is Janene Gerlach. I frolicked a far way from home when I decided to attend the Pennsylvania State University in 2010, and a year later, my gray hairs are already sprouting. I partially blame late night study sessions in the dark corners of this campus, but I predominately blame the challenging and comprehensive courses available for student immersion. LA101H is such a class. About 18 college kids somehow stumbled into 113 Thomas Building on January 11, and after that day, the cleaning ladies gawked at the cleanliness of the room; our jaws hitting the floor at the sight of the syllabus doubled as mops. Our melodramatic reaction was unwarranted; we had nothing to fear. Each assignment, though time consuming, was not only within the realm of our abilities, but also served to launch us into another realm; one of expansion. Growth does not occur without the intake of external material, and LA101H required that we look outside ourselves and digest what was necessary.
In a nutshell, my experience with LA101H left me absolutely convinced about several rhetorical tactics. You must arm yourself with knowledge, trim your words with precision, and understand your audience if you wish to successfully wield rhetoric. If I am to speak extraneously without knowing my topic or my audience, I achieve nothing. Similarly, kairos, a specific moment in time when rhetoric would be most beneficial to solving a problem, became my special friend these past months. I grasped this concept by the hand and now he follows me everywhere. He acts as a pointer dog, and sometimes I take him up on his suggestions, but often I bite my tongue. Personal discretion and intuition balance kairos so that I do not speak every time a situation warrants it. When I do speak, my words are more powerful because I have not squandered them on lesser problems.
I have traveled many miles in the past year; some were spent wandereding in circles, but others branched out and away from where I started. I must say, the view has certainly improved. Thank you, and please enjoy the delightful distraction of browsing through my profile.
-Janene
