Mini paper

Due: September 9 by 11:59p.m., in the appropriate D2L assignment folder

Quick Reference Guide

  • Word count: 750 words
  • Genre: academic essay for the Humanities
  • Exigence: to understand how rhetoric drives writing 
  • Format: MLA or APA
  • Audience: Me
·       Background
We began this semester with Keith Grant-Davie's "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents." In this helpful article, Grant-Davie introduces us to the many dimensions of the rhetorical situation. We then moved into readings that speak in various ways to issues animating computers and writing and focused on how writers shape their arguments in response to ever-shifting rhetorical situations.

Objective
For this mini-paper, I invite you to select one of readings and, using the Grant-Davie article, detail the rhetorical situation in which it was authored: who? why? for whom? In other words, what was the exigence, the audience, the purpose? Pull appropriately from the readings to support your assertions.

Your specific research question: how did the author's rhetorical situation shape their piece of writing?

Assessing
I plan on using this brief assignment to gauge your current writing level and will spend more time providing feedback on mechanical, syntactical, and grammatical areas of your writing than I will do for the longer literacy tasks. Specifically, I will be looking for you to
  • Pull appropriately from the reading to support your assertions
  • Construct a clearly articulated main point early in your writing
  • Illustrate a command of grammatical and mechanical elements of writing
  • Trim superfluous words and, when needed, passive voice from your writing
  • Properly format your essay according to MLA or APA guidelines

Good luck! I’m happy to help if you need some additional assistance at any stage of this paper. You can reach me as well via email at Michael.rifenburg@ung.edu or on Twitter @JMRifenburg.




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