Ramage paper

Hey everyone, this is a very rough draft of the begining of my paper. Hope everyone has a good weekend!!



My front porch was covered in a thin layer of snow so dry it looked more like packing peanuts. So far, January’s attempt at a winter filled with two-hour delays and sledding had come up short. In an hour, the morning sun would melt the snow off the roads just in time for my thirty-mile drive to Kutztown.
Avoiding the occasional patch of ice, I headed back inside to pack my book bag for my Tuesday/Thursday itinerary: Ramage’s book for Advanced Composition and a 3-ring binder filled with Grimm and Feminist fairy tales assigned for Rhetoric of Literature. Before the start of my current semester of college, I wouldn’t have had a clue how the two related. A week into the courses, I realized they both made it quite clear that I knew absolutely nothing about rhetoric. Tossing the books into my pink bag, I recalled how both professors had asked on the first day of class for a definition of the term. One hundred and one pages divided into three mind-boggling chapters of Ramage-rambling later, I realized my understanding of what rhetoric really was hadn’t improved at all. Beyond explaining what a rhetorical question was, I was lost: stuck in the mumbo-jumbo of Plato’s lack of cooking skills and President Bush’s State of the Union speech. If Rhetoric: A User’s Guide was meant as a round trip-ticket to “Ramageland”, I had clearly missed the bus.
The cliché about how important first appearances are rings true in a lot of scenarios, including text. What, other than confusion, could I expect from an introductory textbook which refuses to give a simple, direct description of the subject at hand? I’ll save my accolades of unique tactics for fictional writing. Instead of clarifying rhetoric, Ramage spends the first eight pages playing devil’s advocate. His anti-rhetoric spokesman was a better persuader than the pro-rhetoric: if I had picked up the book outside of class, I wouldn’t have wanted to read past page two.
I tossed my bag onto the toasted marshmallow colored sofa and hunted for the business card my mother gave me the night before. Between classes I would call PJ’s, a pet store in Manheim, to find out how much they’re charging for a long-haired Chihuahua puppy. Maybe I would sit up with my new puppy like Ramage does with P-Dog and contemplate her potential to act and how behavior restricts her ability to have a fully-functional identity. I doubt it.