Interesting Concepts from A&B

In Allyn and Bacon, I found many things to be very interesting and informative.  It states that we should see writing as critical thinking.  Also, it states that the skills we learn through this book will be directly transferrable to our other college courses.  I think that is very helpful and comforting.  I was also very intrigued by the idea of open and closed writing forms.  I had never heard of that before I read this book and I found it very interesting.  Good writing can vary from open to closed forms depending on how you want your audience to react.  I really liked the quote, "good writers write for a purpose to an audience with a genre,"  I think that is true and also very relevant. The section about messages also interested me a lot.  It stated that messages persuade through their angle of vision and through appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos.  I discovered the difference between ethos, logos and pathos, which I had rarely heard of before this book.  A quote that I was really intrigued by was, "humans are beings that by nature respond to symbols."(Burke).  I found that interesting because it is so true, but many people do not really think about it very much, I certainly didn't think about at all when writing previously.  Also, A&B talked a lot about thesis statements and their importance to a paper.  I will definitely use the advice when I am writing a paper in the future because the author put it in such simple words that it makes it very easy to understand.  I think that what I have learned so far in A&B will come in very handy when I am writing papers for this and future college courses.