The first moment is shown in this picture which was took by my classmate Angel. This is a picture of our Scavenger Hunt activity. In this activity, my partners and I paid our attention to some moments happening in our daily life. We were looking for some things in life which can be defined as a rhetorical situation. One of our findings was that I went a subway to make my order. This kind of scenes happen in my life everyday. But before this activity, I had never considered this moment can be a rhetorical situation. In other words, as a writer, before this activity, I hadn't think about rhetorical situations. After this activity, I realize that there are so many moments in my life can be "the moment" that can be an inspiration for my writing. Sometimes, when I was given a project or assignment that required me to write something without a given topic, I often worried about that because I didn't pay much attention to some details in my life. However, after this activity, I started to focus on some details in my life and I can use them as my resource or even topic for my writing.
The second moment drew my special attention is the "Selling an argument" activity and this picture is a poster which was made by my partner Ali, Geoff and me during this activity. This activity was a pretty interesting one, as well as a relatively difficult one because we had to pay much attention to the genre. We worked as some designers and planners to sell our product which means we had a very formal genre. We had to think about how to use not only formal but also appealing language to persuade our boss to pick up our design and to make potential customers to buy our product. In the cover letter, we used formal words and we discussed what information is suitable to be shown in a cover letter. From this activity, I realized the importance of genre which would have big impact on my future study and career.
The third moment happened in the first day of this course. We were asked to introduce ourselves to our new teacher and classmates. Look back at that moment, I feel that a good introduction is a pivotal part of our study, our work and our life. I can count how many times I have been asked to introduce myself. Nearly every course I took had a requirement to let me introduce myself. However, every time I was required to introduce myself , I was a little bit nervous and I just showed some unremarkable information of myself. This is not good because sometimes, especially in some important job interviews, a good introduction can enhance the good impression you left to others. This can be true in my writing. At the beginning of your writing, we need to sell yourself to the readers. You need to make it clear as well as special. There are too many works in this world for the readers to read every single one of them carefully. So you have to draw the readers' attention at the beginning so that they could be interested and willing to read more. A good introduction can be a good combination of ethos, pathos and logos. If I can make good use of these three materials in my introduction, I believe that my introduction can be a special and impressive one.
You describe selling an argument, I think that this is very important because just like in business, writing is a like a pitch. As you say you're selling yourself to your audience, and if you're a strong enough rhetor or author you can actually command pay for your writing or speaking. Additionally you describe how you need to use this knowledge to change your appeal, to understand what the audience actually wants from you and how to emulate or develop that to your as well as your audience's expectations.
ReplyDeleteI liked the way you talked about your first two moments, specially the scavenger I felt in the exact same way even though I was in a different group then yours. The idea of connecting the concepts that we learned during the class for our writing was very interesting and really helped me to understand some concepts that I didn't had an idea of how to find or connect with real live
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