Week 1 Recap

This week had gone by very fast for me. I decided that I am going to recap the things that we went over in class this week.

On Monday we went over the Rhetorical Triangle and discussed critical reading.

Learning about the Rhetorical Triangle was interesting to me. It explained the relationship between rhetoric, text and audience. The text is used to communicate directly with your audience but you also want to have an indirect relationship or knowledge of the audience in order to communicate well with them.

To write effectively we need to learn to read critically. Some steps to doing that are to highlight and annotate. We should ask ourselves: What is the author’s purpose? What are they trying to do? Who are they trying to do it to? We also need to analyze style and structure. This can range from highbrow such as a PHD paper, to lowbrow which would be inappropriate jokes or texting. Our job as readers is to look for the obvious and ask: What’s the message? How are they trying to say it? What’s familiar about it? What isn’t making sense? What’s the rhetoric?

On Tuesday we discussed the structure of an essay. An essay contains 3 main parts, the introduction, body & conclusion.

In the introduction there are also 3 important parts: Setup which contains attention grabbers to generate interest, the thesis which is a statement in the introduction that presents your argument to the reader & the roadmap which explains the structure of the body.

The body of the essay will contain more details which were presented in the roadmap. Unique ideas should get their own paragraph along with stories. You should write the body first and then work on the structure.

The conclusion will contain key points of the body and direct to action. All effective writing does 2 things: 1- Educates the audience, 2- Moves them to action.