Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Reflecting on your persuasive essay
Let’s start today’s class by taking a few minutes to reflect on completing your third essay for this course. As with previous reflections, feel free to comment on any significant lesson you took away from completing this assignment, but I would be most interested in reading about what it was like for you to move from analyzing other writers’ rhetoric to creating your own rhetorically effective and appropriate appeals in a piece of writing. What kinds of strategies did you use and find effective? Why did you use them? What kind of reader were you trying to reach? How did writing for this non-academic/non-specialist audience differ from writing for a more scholarly audience in your first two essays?
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I liked this assignment infinitely more than the previous assignments, simply because I was able to include my own opinion. Actually, not only was I able to include it, but I was supposed to center my entire paper around an opinionated thesis statement. At first, I struggled with this paper, because it has been years since I last wrote a research based paper, if that's what this can be called. I really didn't know where to start, and my idea was extremely general. But, before long I was able to narrow my ideas down to a strong concentrated idea involving animal cruelty. I especially like the part where we were encouraged to include personal stories, because I love to write them. I thought I had a great paper, but then I went to the writer center, and it was all shot down by the guy who looked at my work. At first, I was bummed, but then I realized that he was write. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to revise for hours, which was very difficult for me. But, alas, I think that the final product has greater organization, and is easier to understand. I realized that I didn't really have a thesis, which would have been a huge problem. With the help of the writer center guy I was able to develop a sold thesis in a solid introduction.
ReplyDeleteI think the major lesson I took away from this assignment is regarding my tone. I was attempting to appeal to audiences that may have been opposed to my argument, but at first I was being too declarative. I hadn't encouraged them to see my perspective, but was attempting to force them. I think by adding more personal narrative throughout my essay, my paper became less formal and more approachable. I definitely think it was helpful in crafting my own essay to start by reading other examples from different authors. It definitely helped me decide how to form my paper and what kinds of evidence to present. One strategy I used was to present the kairos, or timeliness of my essay. I also think I established my ethos through using reputable and credible sources, like newspapers and journal articles. Also, by the end, I think I was appealing to pathos. I tried to make an emotional appeal as one last final effort to get people to see my perspective. Hopefully, it worked. Through these strategies, I think I was able to appropriately address both pro-choice advocates and pro-life supporters. Hopefully my argument didn't come off as offensive or far-fetched. You can definitely tell a difference between this essay and my first two essays. Besides creative writing, I've never written an essay that wasn't strictly formal. I liked being able to use more relaxed jargon and speak in the first person. I hope I have the opportunity to write essays like this again in the future.
ReplyDeleteThe change from analyzing rhetoric to creating a rhetoric of my own was one that was aided by our previous assignments. I feel that by having worked on examining other people's use of rhetoric I had a good base to begin building my own. I also chose a topic that I believe has a very strong and obvious place on what is "moral". I tried to integrate the factual analysis of different texts in order to create a rhetoric that relied heavily on a cause and effect relationship. I tried to make the clear point that even if you don't think racial profiling is bad in theory (which you should) then you cannot argue with the fact that the violence and animosity towards law enforcement that comes from it is. I used mostly appeals to logos, with the use of facts. I did include some short narratives that could be seen as an appeal to pathos. I think my article was focused towards an audience of educated people who had never experienced racial discrimination. The article would be most effective on audiences who had always felt protected by the police and never experienced what it was like to be profiled on race.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this prompt a lot more than the previous prompts mainly because it was an assignment that I was able to tailor more to what I wanted to work on. However, that also made this assignment a little more difficult because for my specific topic I picked something that was very broad, and with a lot of information. This made it hard to narrow my focus which is something I have struggled with in the past two essays. I think that if I continue to work on this essay I can continue to narrow it and better fit it to my argument. The strategies that I tried to use for this essay included working off of a lot of commonplaces, as my argument was something I think that a lot of people would agree with and have some base knowledge about. Another commonplace I appealed to was a person’s patriotism and why this should encourage them to better take ownership of their country. I did not use a personal narrative because it would have been hard to fit this into my essay but I did try to establish a strong ethos, and appeal to pathos through a more logical method. I believe my topic caused enough emotional strife that when people think about it they feel anger and frustration at the lack of progress Congress makes. When I was writing this essay I was attempting to aim at that non-academic but more educated reader, such as someone who reads a magazine such as Time on a regular basis. This meant that I did not really have to “dumb” down any of my sources, as they were all articles someone who reads biweekly publications, such as Time, would more than likely understand. It was interesting to write to a different sort of audience, away from the scholarly audience because I had to remember that they were educated, and that this would require less introduction in some areas, but also work to explain something that as a student I may hear a lot, but as an average non-specialist reader would probably not remember.
ReplyDeleteI found it not as challenging to implement many of the rhetorical strategies from what we have studied as I thought it would be. However, I did feel like it was difficult to capture the casual writing style without sounding like it was over done. I think the anecdotal stories that many of the authors we studied used was probably the most useful strategy that I used. The pathos filled stories are effective in persuading a reader and strengthening and argument and I believe that in my essay both were true. I was trying to reach an unaware reader, who may not know much about the situation. Writing for this non-academic audience definitely changed my syntax to be more simplified and less verbose, but it also changed my structure in that I could transition more or less directly at any point in time depending on the goal. I felt like there were more options in how much I divulged and in which order than in a traditional academic essay. Also, the points that were important to highlight were different in that in an academic essay whatever evidence is used is in more of the forefront; whereas in this case, I was much more able to focus the paper around my personal opinions so long as I could make them sound logical and like they were backed in factual ideas.
ReplyDeleteThis assignment was a little more difficult for me to find a path that I liked. I knew roughly what I wanted my argument to be, but it was a daunting task sifting through 9 sources to strongly support the argument that I was trying to make. I think that, for me, the major difficulty in switching from analysis papers to crafting my own argument was finding appropriate examples to support it. It was challenging to come up with a few major points that would support my argument, and it took a lot of time and research to finally even start the writing. Once I did start, however, it became easier to find evidence to support my examples, and the writing began to come more easily. Also, once I found my audience I was able to identify a direction that I wanted to take the essay, which made writing easier. Overall, I think that I like this style of writing more than the analysis style because I get to have my own voice. It is a cool thing for me being able to put some of my personal narrative into a piece of writing instead of just writing about what I think other people's narratives are.
ReplyDeleteThe most significant thing that I learned during the process of writing this essay was how to purposely use rhetorical strategies without making it obvious. For one reason or an other it was really hard for me to understand the thought process behind purposely using more than one rhetorical strategy in an essay, it would normally just happen without me having to think about it (however I could identify it in others writing). Sometimes it is the simple things like wondering why I am including a paragraph, that I normally don't pay attention to, that make me think critically about my writing, and make it better.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed being able to create our own appeals to our audience in this paper and felt ready to use the persuasive strategies we analyzed in making our own argument about social justice. The first aspect I hope made my paper effective is by its kairos, as my topic is a growing issue today. Early in my paper, I attempted to make myself credible as an author by using current data and other information from trustworthy and respected sources. Then further along in my paper, I used individual stories to appeal to pathos. I wanted to be able to hook my audience by appearing as a strong, reliable source in presenting this information, and then play on their emotions to make the social justice issue appear real, and a problem that needs their help in solving.
ReplyDeleteThrough writing this paper I enjoyed the ability to be creative and analytical at the same time. I firstly tried to really focus on a specific voice and audience that I wanted to address. It was through this task that I found a somewhat different way to organize my essay than a more thesis driven academic paper. Though this paper I found myself really able to explore how to implement my own pathos and ethos. By doing this, I was created a tone that differed from the first two papers in tone and argument methods.
ReplyDeleteWhen writing this essay, I tried to focus on the order of my ideas and the transitions from one point to another. I made sure that I addressed my points in a logical order while still maintaining a smooth transition between them. By doing this, I was unable to place my strongest appeal to pathos at the end of my essay. I wanted to end on a strong emotional appeal, but it seemed out of place to have that particular point at the end of my essay. I don't believe that doing this affected the persuasiveness of my paper too much though.
ReplyDeleteThe overall format of my essay was a building of ethos followed by a series of logical appeals to create a better understanding of the issue and then emotional appeals to help the audience connect to the issue a bit more. In the audience of this paper, there was a wide variety of different opinions, so I had to make sure not to come on too strong in the beginning. I addressed the opposition early on in my paper and stated that I recognized that since people feel so strongly about my issue, I may be unable to convince them to change their minds. I asked my audience to perhaps consider my side and be slightly more lenient in their opinions.
I found this essay very helpful in my growth as a writer. Having to apply how I saw other writers establishing ethos was somethings that was new for me applying rhetoric. I also have never written a piece in a pseudo-journalistic styling, and I kind of liked how it was a little less formal and I could use my first person voice. I took strategies such as the one sentence paragraph and writing on my own experiences with social media to prove my ethos to the reader. In my targeted audience, I was trying to educate and inform those not well acquainted with social media as to the power it has to be a great tool of social justice. This group may consist of but is not limited to the baby boomer generation or parents of children today who are growing up in a social media world. I made my writing less formal to appeal to this reader by writing in shorter paragraphs and trying to incorporate enough facts while mixing in small at times comedic diversions in order to keep their interest in the essay. I struggled a little bit to work away from parenthetical citation in my essay. It's the only way I've ever cited sources, but once again this essay helped me to move away from it in informal writing.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I found the most influential in writing a good essay for this assignment was that I was not writing for an academic audience. I was writing to my own community. This was surprisingly impactful to me because it allowed my voice and passion to come through. The strategy of establishing my own ethos was very beneficial to my essay. The effect corresponds to the times that write about something that is very interesting to me. I tend to write a better essay. I cannot pinpoint why this is, but I think it is because I don’t second guess myself, I just let my original thoughts go straight to the text. This is like when I give speeches. I am great at giving speeches with very little outline or guidance, but if it is more scripted, it is less impactful and less true to myself. For my future papers in other classes and in my revising for the final portfolio, I will attempt to revise with a free-spirited and unstructured approach, and then I will work it into the structure of the essay. If I can remove my self-consciousness of my reader and write from my heart, I believe my next essays will be stronger.
ReplyDeleteI was so happy to move away from analyzing the works of others to writing my own piece. As a debater I love writing that persuasive essay where you can feel the opinions of the reader as you try to manipulate and drive them to the topic that your are writing about. I especially felt this in this paper as it is a topic that is so close to home. I found it really interesting to be able to put a name and a face on my audience every time I opened Facebook, (which I never did while writing this paper, obviously). And I think that really helped me to narrow my focus and go on the offensive without being offensive.
ReplyDeleteIn talking to Professor Bateman yesterday I really got a sense of how to drive my final point home by not being afraid to call out the specific audience of the Mormon Church that I was targeting. I think I also worked to really hammer down my point by making the story personal and really showing why it was, that I had chosen to make the point that I did. As I was writing I felt like it was a huge benefit to be writing to a non-academic audience as it forced me to really look for my point and articulate it in such a way that both myself and my reader could understand. I think this approach also really helped me to appear more persuasive as my extensive use of history really worked to improve my ethos and give me a reason to be talking in the first place.
When I approached my subject of campaign finance, I knew that my audience would be from across the country. I found that establishing a strong common ground with the audience in a lot of the pieces that we have read was one of the most crucial parts to making the piece persuasive. I incorporated this idea into my piece by build upon the idea of the idea of the belief and passion for American democracy. This idea was supported with another aspect that was found in nearly all of the pieces we have read, an emotional appeal to pathos. I directed my argument towards campaign finance and how it threatened democracy, making people question the system in which we operate. The country was founded upon the ideas of democracy, and the majority of the country agrees that democracy is the best form of government. By attacking the state of democracy in the United States, the audience feels as though the country that they love so dearly is not as perfect as people may want it to be. This gets the audience "a dog in the fight", and really engages them in the issue. The difference in writing style of this paper versus the previous two I think allowed me tho flow through my ideas more smoothly. I was able to make my argument and support in a much more direct fashion.
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ReplyDeleteThe transition from rhetorical analysis to creating my own persuasive argument proved to be more challenging than I thought it would be. It took a lot of thought and close attention to develop a claim and defend it successfully. I found it effective at parts to address the audience directly, in order to include both them and myself in the larger argument I was making; because I was addressing a middle- and upper-class audience, using the pronoun “we” helped to assuage any accusatory notions. Writing for a non-academic/non-specialist audience as opposed to a more scholarly audience allowed more space within my essay for stylistic embellishment and overall freedom of organization; I found myself writing in shorter paragraphs than I normally do.
ReplyDeleteThis essay was extremely difficult for me. Although I’m comfortable with writing analytical essays, other types of writing don’t come easy to me. I’ve known this about myself for a while, writing that involves more than proving your point is just really not my thing. I think the most difficult thing for me was shifting my audience from an academic one to a nonacademic one. In peer review, people told me that I needed to work more on my voice, have more of a personal identity. That in and of itself was hard, because the voice that I’m used to writing in really is pretty plain, tell the facts like they are, straightforward. As read back over my essay, I realized that I was trying to reach the common people of Portland, just informing them about gentrification and what was going on. I didn’t use a lot of emotional appeal, since I felt that too much could take away from the argument, but I focused on a few specific people who could serve as examples for groups of people in their same situation. I also focused on areas of Portland that were well known, like the Pearl District and the Alberta District. This allowed the audience to more closely connect with my argument because of the immediacy
ReplyDeleteWhen I started writing the paper I asked myself what would move the audience? How would I myself be moved when reading my paper. When I thought about this, I realized that I would have to incorporate my own narrative in the paper. It was easy to talk about at first but then I realized that because I have such a strong connection o the achievement gap issue, I could easily build both ethos and pathos with my narrative. The task after that was figuring out how to frame my paper and how to combine such a strong narrative with so many facts. Because my sources were primarily charts I didn’t want to bombard the reader with facts of have such a dramatic shift between the narrative and the facts. This will sound very elementary but I used my own version of the Oreo method. I opened up with my narrative and ended the paper with my narrative but in the middle I list the facts but I combine the facts with pathos so that there is not such a drastic shift in tone from the narrative and the facts.
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