About + Reflection

Hi everyone,

My name is Adam, I am 23 years old and I am from Stockholm, Sweden. This is my first quarter here at Antioch but my third year living in Santa Barbara. Before transferring to Antioch, I achieved my AA in Business Management at SBCC. Even though I loved SBCC, I am really excited to be at Antioch because I like their way of educate better than how they do it at the City College. Instead of having exams, Antioch are focusing more on papers where you have a greater opportunity to do analysis and reflections which is more similar to how my school was back in Sweden. When I do not study, I try to be as active as possible and I love to play all kinds of sports.

Rhetoric is very important to consider when you communicate with other people. The way you talk, the words you choose, the tones you use, and the clothes you wear do all affect how the receiver interprets and understands your message. Depending on the situation, you might need to use a different kind of language or words in order for the listener to better understand you. For example, you will probably use different words when you explain something for a child compare to when you talk to your professor. When you talk to a child, you will use a more simple vocabulary and you might change your tone to sound friendlier to make it easier for the child to understand. With your professor, your more complex and various vocabulary will come to use and more details will be added to the conversation.

It is also important to choose the correct medium when you are delivering a message to your receiver and to adapt your language and content to reach the receiver to the max. A conversation over the phone requires a higher level of oral skills since you cannot use facial expressions or body language in order to help the listener to understand. At the same time, a face to face conversation can be much richer and detailed if you use your language, expressions, and gestures to deliver the message to your receiver. I believe it was very interesting when they chose to write our book as a comic book instead of a regular school book because they have used a type of writing which normally is used for enjoyment and not for education. They have adapted the language they used to make it fit in a comic book and in my opinion, it was easier to understand the concepts they explained in the form of a comic rather than reading it from a regular school book.