Week 3 Post

There are compound factors about rhetoric that are often dismissed in writing that become unnoticed. What I grasped from reading these articles are that rhetoric directly ties into genres. When writing certain pieces when assigned you automatically know what tone, structure, dialogue, content etc. to be used based on what the article needs to be responded to without even knowing that what you are thinking and writing is rhetoric. For example in Murder! (Rhetorically speaking) the writing assignments were based on different genres. When the questions were being presented to “the class” I could already imagine the type of language that would be used based on the type of genre. In this type of scenario when asked to write from the detective point of view to the eulogy for the deceased I could already assume what type of tone would be used for each of the different genre setting. It is an instinct to assume the type of tone, for example when asked the five questions it was harder to hit all of the five questions for the students because they wanted to write what they know. Writing the responses to each one was based off of each students experience with topic, generally speaking. One of the students parents were attorneys, many of the students have seen crime shows and knew what was being asked from the based off of what they have seen. This piece of writing was a great way to distinguish and recognize the style of rhetoric we use and how it is embedded in our writing skills without even knowing it.

In the Reading of Rhetoric piece the best example that made sense to me was when they were talking about how rhetoric is about saying something at the right time and the identity of rhetoric. You wouldn’t throw out a random sentence that has nothing to do with murder for example in middle of a testimony to the jury such as “the victim was wearing red”. Rhetoric is about defining the identity of the writing piece and saying the right thing to the piece at the right time.