Empoword

How to Use This Book xxxix At the same time, your future writing situations, whatever they may be, will be among complex discourse ecologies—specific groups of readers and writers with specific tastes, interests, and expectations. In this way, working within a learning community teach you to more actively evaluate your rhetorical situation. Rhetorical Situations In this book, you’ll notice a focus on rhetorical situations, which are explained more thoroughly in the General Introduction. Put simply, the act of writing is a response to a rhetorical situation, and no two situations are the same. Think about the differences and similarities between the following kinds of writing: • A letter to your grandmother about your first semester in college • An editorial advocating for immigration reform • An e-mail to a craigslist user about the futon you want to buy • A flyer for a Super Smash Bros. tournament in the Student Union Different circumstances, different audiences, and different subjects require different kinds of writing. These differences ask writers to think critically about genre, language, style, and medium. More importantly, it means that there is no one method for creating “good” writing, no one-size-fits-all, step-by-step guide to success, despite what some of your previous teachers may have claimed. Because you and each member of your learning community has a vastly different future ahead of you, it would be impossible to teach you all the ways you will need to write throughout your lives—especially not in a single college term. Instead of learning rules for writing (rules which will invariably change), it is more valuable to learn the questions you should ask of your future writing situations and produce texts that are tailored to those situations. In this book, you will explore and work within three rhetorical situations. (The beauty of the rhetorical situation, of course, is that no two writers using this book will have the exact same constraints; nevertheless, you will share similar experiences.) Because many college composition programs value the nonfiction essay form, this textbook focuses on three different kinds of essays: a personal narrative, a textual analysis, and a persuasive research essay. The goal of writing these essays, though, is not to become a master of any of them. Instead, the goal is to practice interrogating the rhetorical situations and tailoring your work to be more effective within them. As you learn more about rhetorical situations, think about the many forms that rhetoric takes. Although you are likely using this book for a class with “Writing” in the title, another primary goal of this book is to encourage the critical consumption and production of rhetoric in all its forms. Very little of the writing, reading, speaking, and listening you do is in traditional essay