Writing is most often done with a purpose. If you’re not writing for a purpose, then why are you writing? I think of professional writing as writing with a more formal tone in an attempt to please, persuade, or present information to a targeted audience. Rhetoric is then used to tweak the professional writing to perfection.
Rhetoric, I’ve come to learn, is heavily based on the writer-audience relationship. Bowdon and Scott also put a large emphasis on the audience. The writer’s first goal should be to consider who their primary and secondary audiences will be, or who will be directly exposed to their work and who may see it down the line. An engineering student and a realtor will each respond differently to reading a white paper on what the real estate industry needs to know about insurance and climate change. This may be because the student does not have the necessary background to fully comprehend the information given, or maybe they just don’t care, while the realtor is intrigued by the subject. Although the student might not have enjoyed reading the white paper, that doesn’t mean it was a poorly written document. Bowdon and Scott bring up two types of audiences: audience invoked and audience addressed. Audience invoked is the targeted readers of the paper while audience addressed is the actual readers, those who the document may not have been specifically written for. The real estate white paper’s audience invoked should have been realtors while an engineering student stumbled upon it and became a member of the complex audience addressed. Writers tend to struggle with figuring out who will be a member of their audience addressed and I believe that is a main difference between professional writing and other forms of writing. By publishing or simply posting your work and not knowing who will eventually see it, you subject yourself to criticism from a hostile member of the audience addressed or praise from a wandering member of the audience invoked.
Another rhetorical canon brought up by Bowdon and Scott is the arrangement of the document. Arrangement can be applied to every aspect of the document from something as large as the structure of the overall paper to something small like sentence structure and everything in between. A large subcategory of arrangement is organization. Bowdon and Scott say that professional papers begin with conclusions, the most important information found in the paper. This tactic goes back to the writer-audience relationship. If the writer knows the audience will skim through the paper and only look for the conclusion, it is in their best interest to put it in the beginning, making it easily accessible. If the most important part of the document is unfavorable, Bowdon and Scott recommend putting it towards the end of the document and trying to lighten the mood beforehand. In cases such as progress reports and grant proposals, organization plays a big part in presentation. A progress report to a company to continue their funding of a project which is going very well and one written for a project that is not going so well should be organized differently. If the project is going well, that should be stated in the beginning of the report, then explain why it’s going well. Whereas a project that isn’t going as well should explain the process in a truthful yet hopeful tone, describe the outcome, then explain why the company should continue their funding regardless of the previous results.
My personal interest narrative focused on the importance of after school involved of elementary aged children. Rhetoric is important in this specific paper because if I were to write a paper for the world to see about this topic, I wouldn’t want to sound demeaning or demanding. I would have to reconsider my audience invoked and addressed, and probably reorganize my paper structure. I would begin with statistics showing the positive impact of after school involvement and then go on to explain why being involved from a young age is so beneficial.
After reading many texts about rhetoric from high school writer’s workshop class, seminar in composition, and other writing courses the idea of that the audience matters when writing is drilled into my head. I do agree with that point, it is very important to appeal to your specific audience to make sure they are interested and will not be offended by any possible opinions or language in your piece. Similarly, “Mam636” stated “Rhetoric, I’ve come to learn, is heavily based on the writer-audience relationship. Bowdon and Scott also put a large emphasis on the audience.” However, “Mam636” seems to be suggesting that the audience is the most important influence on rhetoric and backed up his/her conviction with his/her interpretation of Bowdon and Scott’s book on rhetoric. While, in what case do you not have an audience to consider? Most people would say never, because when we write (typically from a student’s perspective, one with very little leisure time) it is due to an assignment we must hand in. In the case that a student writes for themselves, say scribbling down some thoughts in a journal every night and does not let anybody read it then the audience would be nobody. You could argue that when writing in your journal for yourself is not a form of rhetoric. Although last week when we were studying the definitions of rhetoric Dr. Tania Smith stated that rhetoric is not just writing an essay or a poem, rhetoric can be more abstract like architecture or music. In the case or music or architecture there could be no audience as well. One could argue that even though thousands of renowned scholars what claimed that rhetoric is heavily influenced by the audience, that in simpler forms of rhetoric the audience could be as small as the writer. In that case can a writer constitute the audience in the same piece of rhetoric to avoid violating the rules put down by famous rhetoricians.
Sources:
Smith, Tania. “What is Rhetoric?” Edu*Rhetor, 27 Feb. 2012, edurhetor.wordpress.com/about/rhetoric/. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.