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Most likely, the rhetorical situation of your essay -- its purpose, persona,
and intended audience -- is determined by your assignment. Understanding
your assignment, therefore, is one of the first steps that you want to
take in the writing process.
Understanding your assignment.
- How
to Read an Assignment, an online resource published by the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Writing Center, provides a thorough
set of guidelines that can help you understand your assignment as well
as get you started with the planning of your essay.
- How
to Read an Instructor's Assignment, part of the University of Arizona's
Research Instruction Online series, helps to decode the rhetorical requirements
of actual assignments from four different disciplines.
- How
to Read an Assignment, an online handout provided by Harvard University's
Online Writing Center, provides a short, useful list of questions to
ask yourself to find out more about the assignment you were given and
about your knowledge of this assignment.
- George Mason University's Writing
Center Guide to Taking Essay Tests provides a list of keywords likely
to show up both in essay exams and longer written assignments, and explains
what your assignment really means when it asks you to "elaborate,"
"classify," or "analyze."
Considering the rhetorical situation.
- If you are confused about terms of rhetoric you need to use and the
principles of rhetoric to employ in your essay, visit The
Forest of Rhetoric: silva rhetoricae, an online guide to
rhetoric created by Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University. The
site provides an easy-to-navigate overview of key concepts in rhetoric
such as the Rhetorical Situation (see the top link in the left frame)
as well as illuminating examples of Rhetorical Analysis. The webpage's
right frame hosts an index of terms and figures of speech.
- Discovering
What to Write, published online by Paradigm Online Writing Assistant,
offers a comprehensive approach for thinking about your writing project.
If you scroll down the page, you will find a series of exercises that
will help you get started with your writing including brainstorming
exercises, freewriting, and more.
Understanding your audience.
- Audience:
Some General Advice, published by the Writer's Workshop at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, offers an interesting series of questions
that you may want to consider before you begin the writing process,
as the answers to these questions will help you focus your ideas and
gear them towards a specific discourse community.
- To comprehend the significance of audience, read the historical explanation
of audience as a central element of rhetoric, listed under "Encompassing
Terms" on Dr. Gideon Burton's Forest
of Rhetoric website. Be sure to study the "sample rhetorical
analysis in terms of audience" and explore the links to "figures
of speech and audience" as well as "related topics of invention."
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