Understanding Rhetoric and Everything's an Argument

I thought both of these readings were interesting and it made me think about what it means and what it takes to write an academically sound paper. I liked the comic better than the article about argumentative papers, but maybe it was because of the style and tone of the overall texts. I know it takes a lot of work to be a good writer and to write a good academic paper is hard work, it takes time, lots of energy, thought and research.  I use to write a lot when I was younger and as I got older I realized writing creatively versus writing academically is quite different. I do not write so much anymore, unless I am assigned to do it, which I am a lot now, but I do not write for the pleasure of writing anymore. I think life just became more busy and I chose to not make time to write, because really everything is a choice. But even writing creatively can be hard, sometimes I think it is harder than writing academic papers, but it depends I guess. All writing and becoming a good writer is challenging because of the rules and the expectations depending on what you're writing and the audience. If you are writing freely without the expectation anyone will ever read what you write, the rules are different than if you are writing an academic paper meant to be read by your teacher. Or when you write a blog or for a newspaper the rules and expectations and content is different. I have written a good amount of research papers and I haven taken a college course in writing before when I was about eighteen. In that class I wrote in MLA not APA, so again the expectations are different depending on the situation. And now that I am older, my expectations of myself and myself as a writer are different. I do remember I wrote two argumentative papers, for that writing class, both for and against the issue at hand and the teacher was supposed to not be able to tell what side of the argument I was truly on, or what my true feelings were. It was a really hard assignment because I had to argue something I agreed with and than disagreed with and find sources that supported both. I will always remember that paper, because it made me a better writer. I appreciated that the article or reading about academic arguments helped the reader develop an argument step by step. I think this will be helpful for me, since I have not written a paper like that in a really long time.