Analyze
Analyze rhetorical situations in terms of audience, context, purpose, and medium in order to improve your reading and writing.
In Project 1, I had to consider how to approach my analysis of "Terra Firma". I assumed the reader did not know what pathos, logos and ethos were so I took the time to explain the concepts before actually using them. If you're audience does not understand these terms, using them to support your case will be ineffective. Knowing that the audience and medium also helped to dictate the structure of my project. Using the structure suggested from chapter 8 starting on page 150 "Organizing and Drafting Your Rhetorical Analysis": Introduction, explanation of terms used, summary and background of the work, analysis of effectiveness and conclusion, I was able to effectively present my analysis with context and a clear purpose. Evidence of my analysis in terms of audience is given by feedback from an Instructional Assistant, "You have made excellent examples of Quinones-Hinojosa’s use of pathos".
Image source: http://www.ucpress.edu/img/covers/isbn13/9780520271180.jpg
For Project 2, I was introduced to a new concept I had not heard of previously, the "discourse community." For this project we were to choose either a blog format or a video format. Analyzing the situation and the requirements of the project, I knew that I was to describe a discourse community I was apart of. I also realized that I'd be writing to an audience that was specifically NOT a part of my chosen discourse community. I recognized that the purpose of this project was to chose an angle that would introduce my community to my audience in a way that was interesting. This meant going beyond simply defining and describing the community and having a more narrow focus to really profile my topic. I think it is clear from my project 2 that I demonstrated my understanding of audience, context, medium and purpose by writing my project in a way as to address the aforementioned realizations. An example of this could be how I define common nuclear engineering vocabulary for non-engineers in my project "Life on the Atomic Scale".
In project 3 we were introduced to yet another genre called the commentary genre. This gave another chance to determine the appropriate audience that would read the word, the context in which the work was written, the purpose of the work and the medium. We had to have a multimodal component so the medium was something like a blog post. This is connected to the audience because the people that generally read blogs is the general public (anyone can access your blog to see what you have to say). The context and purpose of the commentary was to offer your views and opinions (backed up with anecdotes and facts) on a timely subject. The point was to offer or focus on a new angle; to say something new and different. There is definitely room for more opinion in a commentary than a genre like a research paper. The instructional assistant review stated "You have a lot of good information here and that is the foundation of a good commentary" which seems to show that I was able to properly analyze the situation and write a proper commentary (after edits of course!).