The Rhetorical Scenario

in W131

 

For our purposes, the rhetorical context will build on

Aristotle's  Rhetorical Triangle and will focus on

writer, subject, and audience.

​

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As writers in W131, you target a specific audience beyond the instructor and class peers, then shape your writing to engage these readers. These readers are your targeted audience. You can target audiences for different reasons and purposes.

 

Your primary audience is your ideal reader. Who do you have in mind as you ask "what does my reader know, not know, and want to know."

 

Your class peers will play a vital role as a secondary audience. Your peers will provide you with feedback and support.

 

The instructor serves as both gatekeeper and consultant for your writing.

​

Seeing your writing projects as artifacts [documents/pieces of writing] that will live on after the class can help you better conceptualize your audiences beyond W131/140 who will read your work.

 

Your audience should influence your word choices as well as what you opt to include and exclude in your work. Targeting a specific audience helps you make the difficult choices all writers face: what do my readers know? what do they want to know? what don't they know? and how can I best shape my writing to engage them and share what I have to say?

​

For example, if you're writing about your immersion experience when you attended one Shiva, you would write differently to readers who are unfamiliar with the days of mourning after a Jewish funeral than you would to readers who themselves have cultural familiarity with attendance at a Shiva. Some readers would need terms defined while a different set of readers would know what you meant by Reciting the Mourners Kaddish. Having a specific audience helps you know what to include and what to exclude as you write.

​

Aristotle's Rhetorical Triangle

There are plenty of variations of the Rhetorical Triangle.

Aristotle placed emphasis on three components:

​

Writer/Speaker - Message - Audience

​

For W131/W140, we will start with these as the basics, then add in considerations of context and genre expectations.

​

CONTEXT MATTERS:

An argument to English teachers who are teaching online during the Covid 19 pandemic would be different than an argument made to English teacher who taught in an in-person classroom prior to the pandemic. Likewise, an argument to teachers facing the unique challenges of teaching an in-person English class during the pandemic would differ from the other two. Context matters.

 

THE SHOE/The Ohio State University Stadium:

Ways Context Matters

Context includes setting [time, place, geography, culture, weather, etc] and characters [the people involved] as well as the events surrounding and influencing the setting and characters.

 

Think of walking onto the football field at The Ohio State University stadium. Marching on the field during a band practice takes on a different context than marching at halftime during the OSU versus Michigan game. Both are very different from what a football player would experience. Or, imagine sneaking onto the field at 2:00 AM. Even though the stadium is the same, the setting hasn't changed, the context is very different. Capturing that context is part of bringing your writing to life for your specific audience.

​

For example, when I tell students about sneaking into The Shoe just after they installed a new, faux-grass turf, the story shifts based on which students I'm talking to. At OSU, the students had a point of reference for each gate number and campus security I would have to dodge. Students at IUPUI may not be familiar with what I mean whey I say "The Shoe" or why it's a big deal to sneak onto the field and stand on the 50 yard line. As the audience changes, the parts of the story I include or exclude change.

 

Shift the audience talking with a group of moms at a kindergarten class party, and my story shifts to focus on sneaking into The Shoe with my three-year-old son. My mom-purpose? To give him the rare opportunity to stand on the 50 yard line: every Buckeye's dream. And, I'd take cell photos of him tripping and falling on the new turf as he jumped from hash mark to hash mark. Then I got caught. Security confronted me. I might comment on acting like a startled tourist when security approached me to my students, where I would focus on getting my son out of there as fast as I could to the moms:  "I grabbed his hand and pulled him up on my hip in one split second--even though he was almost half my body weight."

 

The details of the story change based on the audience and purpose, much like you might give a different report on last weekend's escapades to your mom than you would share with your roommate, which might be different from what you'd tell your best friend from high school.

​

In W131 we will use the phrase rhetorical scenario to talk about the ways we think about and accommodate multiple audience for a particular purpose. We will include and expand on Aristotle's major components [writer, audience, purpose] in light of our course-based concerns with genre and multi-modal discourse strategies.

​

Beyond Rhetorical Context:

Seeing Yourself As an Emerging Scholar

My hope is that you see yourself, and your work in the W131/W140 ePortfolio, as adding to the body of research on your chosen topic.

 

You have joined other voices--through hyperlinks and your written commentary--to expand the world of ideas related to your immersion experience. You are an emerging scholar with a voice and a public platform: your ePortfolio.

​