Explain how your previous writing experiences been affected by their rhetorical situations*? That’s one of the major questions you will answer in the process of composing your first essay for this course. Your first essay will be a rhetorical analysis of one of your previous writing experiences. Your essay will do the following things:
It will describe a piece of writing you have written or a writing experience you’ve had in the past.*
It will identify the circumstances that surrounded this writing experience, including some or all of the following: the need for the piece of writing, the context surrounding it, the motivation of it, the constraints you faced, the audience you wrote for, the effect you hoped to achieve for that audience, and other rhetorical considerations.
It will analyze how those circumstances and considerations helped to shape your piece of writing.
It will (as a conclusion) reflect on what you’ve learned from performing this analysis, addressing how these ideas or principles may help with future writing tasks and situations.
Basically, your finished essay should provide a reflection of “how [this] particular writing experience was a result of the particular situation it was related to—how the situation determined what you wrote and why” (Wardle and Downs 497). Ultimately, your rhetorical analysis should provide you with principles, ideas, and considerations for the future.
*In this unit, you will read Doug Downs’s “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making” and Keith Grant-Davie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents,” which will define and discuss rhetoric, rhetorical situations, and more. These and other readings in the unit should help you to better understand the concepts that inform this project.
Process
You will first need to choose a writing experience from your own past. It doesn’t matter whether the writing task was personal, professional, for school, private, and so on. You simply need to choose something that, as Wardle and Downs say, was a “memorable or important enough experience that you can clearly remember the circumstances surrounding the writing” (497). It may even be an experience for which you no longer have the resulting writing.
After choosing your writing experience, reflect on it and analyze it to determine how your rhetorical situation “shaped” your writing. Consider the situation’s exigence, context, constraints, audience(s), and other rhetorical elements** as you analyze the writing experience.
**Again, Grant-Davie’s article and other readings will be helpful here.
Last Completed Projects
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