Let's take a moment...

Moment #1:
For me, the defining moment of our first week in class was making wordles. We talked about how we write, what we write, what we like to write. My own writing process, isn't really something I'd ever thought much about before. And how what we write comes across? Repetition really is important. People will remember something better if you repeat it, and the words I repeated most, didn't really have a whole lot to do with what I wanted to talk about.

This wordle doesn't necessarily have a whole lot to do with our class, but it's a good illustration anyway. It's from my Egyptian History class. An image like this has limited uses, but it certainly had an impact on me.

Moment #2:
I think another key thing I looked at in this class was audience. You hear all the time that you need to change your audience depending on your objectives and who you're talking at. Even if it's something like a program trying to convey information, a vsauce video:

is very different from a CNN news report:

They're both trying to convey information, about something interesting to people. They want them to watch, because that's how they make money. But they're appealing to different kinds of people. For me, this is definitely the hardest part of the class. Making sure I'm addressing my audience in the correct tone is difficult, and this class has helped emphasize this to me.

Moment #3:
One of the things I found the most interesting is learning about the history of rhetoric. I'm a bit of a history buff, so learning about how people like Aristotle and Socrates invented all these concepts that we still use today. To be honest, I'm not as interested in the three appeals as I am in the history around them; the time period that created them

It was one of the first times that people could afford to spend the whole day theorizing about abstract concepts like writing and rhetoric, as opposed to theorizing about where your next meal would come from. And we're now in a time period where that happens all the time. Perspective is just as important in writing as in history.
You need to know about the background of your topic. And to me, history is one of the more interesting things we have learned about.