Intersectionality

Lexi Vincent

Mr. Joshua Galat

ENGL 106

16 January 2016

Reading Discussion #1

According to Lunsford, rhetoric is the art, practice, and theory of ethical communication. (pg. 5). There are many ways we experience rhetoric in our everyday lives. It is all around us in conversations, movies, advertisements, books, and even body language. In order to make rhetorical relationship between speaker and audience people often use ethos, pathos, and logos.

        Ethos are used when someone is demonstrating credibility and knowledge about their topic. The more credible a person sounds, the more effective their paper will be.  People use pathos when they are trying to draw on the emotions and interest of their audience. They do this by using personal stories, experiences, or observations. Logos is an appeal to logic or reasoning.

 A rhetorical situation is when an author is writing (or speaking from written notes) in a different set of specific circumstances- addressing certain audiences for a particular purpose, using certain technologies, and so on. (Lunsford, pg. 18). When analyzing the rhetorical situation, you should keep the purpose, the audience, the stance, the genre, and finally the medium and design in mind. (Lunsford, pg. 20). When thinking about the genre one should ask themselves a few questions. One of these questions being whether or not a person gets to choose the genre. The genre of a paper should correspond to the topic. For example, “If you want to convince readers to recycle their trash, you would likely write an argument”. (Lunsford, pg. 20). The audience has a major impact on the effectiveness of your paper. Knowing the intended audience before writing can make the paper more effective. In correspondence to knowing the audience, keep in mind how much the audience knows about the topic. If a person is writing a paper about oncology, and the audience is a group of first graders, odds are the paper will not be effective. Purpose, what is the goal, and how do those goals influence other aspects of the analysis. Are they trying to inform, persuade, or entertain your audience? The decision on this matter could also have an impact on how effective the paper is. Next, is the context. It is important to know what other people have said about the topic chosen. This information can be used to support the claim in a paper. Finally, is the medium and design. If the person gets to choose the medium, they should pick one that works best for the audience and purpose. The way someone designs the work also depends on who is going to be reading it. For instance, if a person is writing a scientific report, they should use charts and tables to support their claim. These are all things you should think about when analyzing your rhetorical situation.