This is more or less the intro to my paper. I'm still kind of working on where to go from here so I'm open for suggestions or any useful criticism!
--Heather.



Before I can start reading Ramage, I have to transport myself into an alternative place in preparation for my journey. I first viewed entering this journey as a time for learning and relaxation. I wanted to immerse myself into an educational world of straight-forward rhetoric and the different ways it could be used, interpreted, and identified. I went into my journey an eager pupil prepared for what my teacher had to throw at me. Little did I know that what was being “thrown” at me was more than I had bargained for.
I entered the introduction (so misleadingly named, I may add) prepared with my mind open and consciousness wholly intact. I was prepared to tackle rhetoric with all of the might in me. I was prepared to prove to Ramage, my professor and leader in my journey, that I was, in fact, a student like no other he had seen before. A student filled with desire to engulf herself in the subject matter and a student who had grasped the concepts well enough to successfully exhibit the application of everything she had learned. I was a devoted soldier prepared for battle and ready to fight for my cause. If I only had known how gruesome the battle of Rhetoric: A User’s Guide by Ramage would be.
Upon entering my classroom, or stumbling across the first few lines of text, my wide eyes and excitement about my journey toward fully comprehending rhetoric were met by an unexpected change of scenery. This wasn’t the cozy classroom of students, such as myself, ready to begin an introductory lecture and discussion session by our well-respected and compassionate professor. This was quite the opposite. I had unknowingly just enrolled myself into the military. I was in boot camp.
I walked through the door and was handed my uniform and mission, but was never equipped with the weapons, or any means necessary for that matter, to complete my task. The other soldiers and myself were thrown onto the battlefield of rhetoric blind and unequipped, forced to dodge the never-ending bombardment of extensive vocabulary words, confusing tangents, and ridiculous comparisons. I was devastated. This isn’t what I had signed up for.
The introduction, or as I like to think of it, the beginning of the never-ending war of Ramages’s lessons of rhetoric, was brutal. Ramage was there, present in a physical sense at least, barking off orders. He was our drill sergeant. The teacher I had such high expectations for morphed into an ugly, unfair dictator who was completely inept from even the slightest form of human compassion. He was brutal to say the least.
I became depressed when I learned that the Introduction wasn’t even the real battle. This was just basic training. Disheartened and mentally wounded, (I could say physically too because not only did I suffer from a huge blow to the ego for not entirely comprehending the text/battle, I suffered from a few paper cuts as well) I forged on. I made my way out of the Introduction, slowly but surely and not without the aid of a few packs of cigarettes (you could attribute that to the physical damage too, because God knows my body needed something to pull me through. I swear, Ramage forced me to do it!) I graduated from basic training and was now entering the real battle.
Our battalion traveled out of “The Way of Rhetoric” (those left of us at least) and we apprehensively approached the next phase of our war. The first true battle, Rhetoric and Identity. I realized from the basic training that I shouldn’t form any type of expectations when entering something new, but I was appalled at how much more gruesome this battle would be. This was the real stuff, this was the blood and guts, what people died for (metaphorically speaking of course, I myself had done this a few times already)