Rhetoric And The Writing Process Essay

Rhetoric includes factors that must be taken into account at the moment of writing. While many people think of “rhetorical” as when someone “asked a question that they already knew the answer to”, that is just the common, vulgar usage of the word, which I shared. Nevertheless, this word implies many other aspects of effective writing that should be taken into account.
While reading through the Online Writing Lab—Purdue for Rhetorical Situations, I modified several things I thought I already knew or understood. For example, the site says that “rhetoric” can be used to imply a persuasive speech, while to others it might be used in a more negative way to express things like lying.
I also did not realize how complex rhetorical situations are. The site breaks down rhetorical situation into five parts: a text, an author, an audience, purposes, and a setting. Every good paper has these five aspects, but I had never thought of them, even though I write frequently. For me, that is the most important part of the text: it raises awareness of the implied characteristics of a paper, so that one may manipulate them to his or her convinience. Especially, I did not take into account the culture that I wrote in and for. I now realize the importance of this characteristic, and will be taking it into account for now on. The pretention that one writes writes universal literature is false, as writing is specific to each culture; one must incorporate elements of his or her culture, or that of his target audience, into the writing process, to make it specific for that culture.
In the section “Aristotle’s Rhetorical Situation,” I began to understand what logos, ethos, and pathos meant. I was familiar with these terms before reading this section, but I was never fully aware of what they meant. For example, I had always heard that logos meant “logic or reasoning,” but I never realized that logos originally had more to do with the speech and its content or organization. While both of these definitions are related, it is important to be aware of the importance that speech structure holds in the communication process. The internal logic that arguments have to hold to be effective is very important in the argumentative process.
Overall, I learned a lot from this website. The insight it provides towards the elaboration of texts is indispensable, as it allows the writer to more effectively get his or her point across, which is especially useful for argument analyses. Rhetoric can even be used to reflect on the argument analysis papers that we will be looking at. I am definitely planning to refer back to this site when writing some of my papers and analyzing others so that I can refresh my mind about all of its contents, as they are very important for the effective writing of a text.