Short, Reflective Essay

This portfolio reflects a range of rhetorical strategies, each specifically responding to a particular exigence and each tailored to the audience, expectations, and genre for that audience. Every rhetorical situation carries its own set of constraints; in this portfolio I have strategically paired different types of writing with different audiences. The subject of all these different approaches is predominantly free speech issues on liberal arts campuses—the blog posts are the only exception, but I have learned about the relationship between genre and audience though them. I have explored what genre is through blogs, tried out several different genres for different rhetorical situations through projects, and matched genres to specific audiences in my essays.

In my final project I experimented with different genres and defined what genre means when considering rhetorical strategies. Writing a multi-genre essay inherently means assembling different types of information together to create a cohesive whole that reaches a specific audience. I wrote my essay to be accessible, and true, examples of the ways activism on campus ironically produces widespread student apathy. An academic article, for example, adds reputable authority to my claim that student activism is ineffective and therefore unproductive at inspiring apathetic youth to take interest. Pictures of a protest, however, let the reader experience the noise and colors of free speech that UW students daily wade through. Though both genres are simple enough to be understood quickly, they approach the same audience with different motives: the article draws a logical connection between over stimulation and desensitization, whereas the pictures provide a frame for the reader to understand the emotional discrepancy between activist students and passive bystanders.

In my RP3 project, I wrote with a formal voice to a specific audience: readers of an academic journal. Everything changes from my lexicon, to statistics, to examples and anecdotes, and length because of the change in audience. Rather than writing to a general, averagely educated audience, I wrote to a highly educated audience in a scholarly environment. The constraints of this audience include assumptions that this audience will readily understand complex ideas, will not need to be told through stories or pictures, and will have a longer attention span. Though I used real examples again, they were employed to place the issue of collegiate free speech into historical context—rather than entertain the reader. I have tailored the academic essay to reach an academic audience who is interested in more complicated ideas and deciphering national trends.

Blog posts provide an unrestricted forum in which to experiment with genre and try to define what it is (or is not). For instance, in “Genre is the Mother of all Rhetoric,” I first try to understand how an exigence elicits a particular audience, which in turn elicits a particular set of restrains to effectively write within. Understanding how audience and setting changes style is crucial: a presidential speech is may not be effective as an advertisement, a student protest may not effective as a research article. Similarly, in “The Proposal” I lay out the constraints of writing to an academic audience and explore what kinds of writing would be appropriate and successful. Likewise, “Multiple Genres” and “Carbone and Sista Tongue” are examinations of what genre is, how it works, and how to pair a genre with an audience. I felt that Sista Tongue wrote to a more specific audience than “Carbone,” but I enjoyed the variety of genres “Carbone” presented. “Sista tongue” is more strictly informational, but “Carbone” is persuasive on a personal level because of its tragic narrative.

I have learned that, to be an effective writer or a persuasive voice, you must consider who will receive your message and write for that particular audience. This means balancing pathos, ethos, and logos in a way the audience can relate to, this means using images and language the audience can easily understand, and this means writing in a voice that your audience is interested in listening to. In this portfolio, I have attempted to manipulate my rhetorical style in multiple ways, to correspond to formal and informal audiences, and employed many different strategies to communicate a message.