A Rhetorically Based Model

By Author: FIRELEAVES
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In our teaching of this kind of writing curriculum, we have found that concepts of rhetoric—audience, purpose, and genre—are especially tangible for students in a class or project on community and work-place writing. By teaching writing with a "rhetorically based model," we call students' attention to texts as sites of negotiation between writers, readers, and contexts. These concepts Breitling Replica provide students with accessible and generative ways to analyze texts they encounter, use, and read, and they provide an entry point for composing unfamiliar genres. When writing documents meant for a specific community or workplace, the concept of audience becomes more meaningful to students. In addition, the rhetorical concepts are readily transferable across writing situations, offering a critical approach students can use as they write within and beyond the classroom.

Teaching rhetorical awareness means asking students to think about how purpose, audience, and genre work together to inform and give shape to pieces of writing. ...
... This approach helps students imagine the act of writing behind a given document. For example, Christina often works with middle school and high school students on a Genre Scavenger Hunt activity. She and her students gather all the kinds of texts that they encounter on a given day. Back in the classroom, they work in small groups to talk about each text's primary and secondary audience, the purpose and goals of the writer(s), the form and design of the document, how and where it might be used, and the style and formality of the language the writers have used. Suddenly, genres that are familiar to students—menus, websites, flyers—become sites of inquiry, occasions for analyzing the choices a writer made in constructing, writing, and designing a document with a specific purpose and audience in mind. This kind of activity also builds an awareness in students, so that they begin to see when writers handle rhetoric effectively and when they don't, engaging students in critical-thinking skills that help them to evaluate the texts that surround them on a daily basis.

Using rhetoric to teach writing is not a new concept, but too often rhetoric is not used as a frame-work when teaching workplace and community-based writing. Instead, students are asked to memorize and reproduce templates for documents such as memos and business letters. Many classes entitled Business Communication or Technical Writing focus on the forms of genres often used in the workplace—the memo, business letter, resume, proposal, report—and treat these forms as formulas and templates. Students are told to write with certain-sized margins, fonts, spacing, and indenting. Students may leave these courses with the impression that writing for the workplace is easy— simply follow the template laid out in the textbook and you can't go wrong.

We can see why the template-based approach is tempting for both teachers and students. The work of designing a document is simplified into a form that can be applied to many different writing situations. But the reality of writing in the community or workplace is often much more complicated. Format, formality, font, length, and the expectations of readers can and often do differ from one workplace or community setting to another. The wide array of style sheets that exist in Omega Replica Watches corporate settings speak to how both large corporations and local businesses use style and language to present themselves to the public, to their employees, and in their daily business transactions. There are considerations of audience, word choice, tone, and many other concerns that a writer must negotiate, and these considerations exemplify the kinds of questions that we want students to ask as they write in our classrooms and beyond. Our goal is to empower student writers with the approaches and thinking skills to negotiate differing levels of variety and expectations in their writing—both now and in the future.