At the beginning of the semester, I had a general idea of what Rhetoric and Civic life were. I knew that activism was a part of it, and it was how you were involved in activism. I didn’t fully understand just how complex it is with the different lenses and perspectives that affect the message that is being conveyed in one form of media. I used to think you were either active or you weren’t which I don’t necessarily think is true anymore. Everyone has beliefs and chooses to act on those beliefs in different ways.

Rhetoric and Civic life are far from black and white, which is another part that I learned through the semester. At the beginning of class, when I thought about civic engagement or rhetorical criticism, I thought of black and white issues where there was a wrong side and a right side. With the skills that I learned in the class, I now see that other problems are not so clean-cut because they affect so many people and have so many perspectives. And even the issues before that I was very set in my opinions on them, I realized there are deeper layers to every problem that I wasn’t seeing before.