Writing Process

Writing an essay is much more than just an introduction, body and conclusion. True, these are the key components but there are many other things a good writer needs to include to write effectively. Writing a good essay takes time, not many people, if any, can just sit down at a computer and type a flawless, inspiring, informative essay in one shot. There is a process for writing, starting with getting to know your audience and topic. Knowing your audience is one of the most important steps in the writing process because they are the reason you are writing. Next you need to get all your thoughts out on paper in your first draft. This helps to lay out everything you know about your topic so you can see what is important, what you can cut, what needs to be added and so forth. Once you've rounded your first draft out you should get have someone else take a look at it. Peer review is especially important because often a writer can't see certain flaws in their own work. Peer review is a good idea after every draft of your essay, so you can see trouble areas you still need to work on. All through out the writing process you should be adding rhetorical tools to help organize/clarify and draw your audience in. There are many tools a writer can use, for example Cause and Effect/Causal Chains. This tool helps readers to follow along better because they can see a direct cause from an event and how events effect each other in the long run. Another tools is the use of Gazes, like Consumer Gaze. Consumer Gaze tries to get customers to buy a product so they do a commercial to a popular song that gets stuck in your head so you remember the product and hopefully buy it. Although there are many tools, you don't have to use all of them. Just use enough that you get your point across to your reader in a way that is clear and concise, while holding their interest. After the body of your essay is done then you can work on writing your introduction/conclusion. The introduction should catch your audiences attention and state your thesis, whereas your conclusion sums up what you've talked about and again states your thesis. Once this is done and you are satisfied with what you've written, make sure to read it out loud to yourself so you can hear if it flows nicely. If it does, then you've completed your essay!

Blog Reviews

Blogs I reviewed:

Whitney Mattox
http://whitneymattox.blogspot.com/
Good- How to Write an Essay
What I thought needed work- Cause and Effect Blog 4A

Kelsie Hair
http://writewithme-kelsiehair.blogspot.com/
Good- Rhetorical Terms Blog 7A
Needed work- Helpful Elements Blog 12B

Geena Gross
http://geenagrossenglish.blogspot.com/
Good- Subject specific rhetorical tools
Needed work- The idea of a Peer Review

Process Explanation

Throughout this class I have learned so much about writing. The most important of which is a process to write essays. The first step, after a topic has been chosen, is for the writer to simply write down all the knowledge they have on the subject. This step is important because it separates for the writer what they already know, from what they still need to find out. Once the needed information is gathered, the writer can start organizing and refining the essay. In this step, the writer should add rhetorical tools to help bring in their audience. This is when the writer can use things such as compare/contrast, visual gazes or cause and effect to convey what is important. A possible way of organizing the information could be by using classification and division.  Once the first draft is finished, it's important to have it read by another set of eyes. Sometimes other people can catch things in an essay that the writer can't. Then after editing the essay, the writer can make changes and be satisfied with the final product.

Classification and Division

As a writer, you can't always count on your audience knowing as much about the subject as you do. Oft times the audience can get lost in a sea of confusing phrases and give up on trying to understand what the essay is trying to convey. In these cases, when the subject matter is difficult to comprehend, it is useful to use Classification and Division.

Classification and Division is a technique in which the author breaks the essay down into smaller segments, in which the important terms pertaining to the essay are thoroughly defined. In this way the audience can get some background information so that they can understand the material better. Classification is dividing the essay into bigger chunks of related information, whereas division is breaking down the classification segments into even smaller, more detailed pieces. By using this tool, an author can define any important terms that are used in their essay and directly link them to specific issues within the article. This makes it easy for the audience to follow along and stay on the same wavelength as the writer.

Defnitions cont.

In my article, it talks a lot about something called a "Nuer". A Nuer is a type of ethnic group found predominantly in the newly independant region of Southern Sudan. Nuer's are darker skinned than the northern peoples and easily recognized. The Nuer's are often discriminated against if they live in the north and treated like second-class citizens.

Mary, the subject in my article has only one profitable skill and that is making and selling alchohol illegally. She uses a big plastic jug and a soda bottles to brew it. She has been caught multiple times and has recieved countless whippings as punishment.

Dual citizenship is important in this reading. It means that Mary cannot be a citizen of both Sudan and Southern Sudan. Which leaves her to choose between a underdeveloped and dangerous South Sudan or a discriminating, unjust Sudan.

Description

Details can make or break a writer's work. Too little and the essay will seem dry and listless, too many irrelevant details and the audience will get bored. Definitions should be used to help the audience get a better understanding of the authors point. When explaining a definition, it should be more than just a dictionary answer. A writer needs to explain why the definition is being used, in what context, give an example or possibly explain the process that it is used in.

The New York Times article I chose is entitled "For Woman in Sudan, No Escape From Misery". The article explains the harsh living conditions for Southern Sudanese living north of the border. South Sudan recently split from Sudan to form an independant nation. By doing so, some Southern Sudanese were trapped on the north side and are unable to get back to South Sudan. The discussion in which it is taking part is about the hard living conditions for those in other countries, and the many difficulties they face by living there. The article tries to open the publics eyes as to what people of other nations are having to go through.

Rhetorical Terms

Any good writer knows that rhetorical tools are a must have in their work. I've gone over many different kinds such as plasticity, open-ended closure, visual gazes, compare/contrast techniques and others in my past blogs. As a writer, you need to be aware which specific rhetorical tools will best help get your point across to your intended audience. Some tools are used more effectively towards a certain group of people than compared to another. For example if you are a car salesman, you would probably want to use a compare/contrast technique to show a potential buyer how your cars are better than another car dealer's. You would not want to use, say, open-ended closure because it doesn't suit your needs as a salesman.

Some new rhetorical terms we learned today were persuasive themes, master narratives, content & technical signatures and audience resonance/effects. All of these are applied towards visual media. A persuasive themes aim is to make the audience feel emotions like nationalism, tradition or even scapegoating. It is universal and can apply to anyone. A master narrative is similar, but it applies to people in a specific area. Master narratives are rooted more in culture and context and they can reflect things like shared hopes and concerns of a particular community. Almost all visual communications have a tendancy to package the imagery and technical elements in a way that a viewer could identify a familiar structure or signature to it. This is called content and technical signatures. Signatures reflects distinct characteristics and choices for a piece of visual media. Last but not least is audience resonance and effects. It's a "return of investment". To clarify, it's a way to measure if a campaign had the desired impact of the audience it was intended for. Indicators can help to measure the amount of influence, for example, a soap commercial had on an audience once it was aired. An indicator in this case would be the number of bars of soap that were sold after the commercial started airing.

Compare and Contrast

Compare and Contrasting is important in writing because it can give the audience a lot more details to work with. The audience can decide for themselves which similarities and differences they want to compare, which can influence the way they read something. There are two ways to write an essay in a compare/contrast form. The first is Point by Point comparison, where similarities and differences are found in specific details in two arguments. The writing kind of jumps back and forth between the two stories in order to compare and contrast them.

The second way is called Subject by Subject comparison. This is where the entire argument/story is compared to the entire opposing argument/story. Personally I prefer this way because for me it's easier to look at the big picture all at once and then compare that to another full picture rather then comparing little bits.There are advantages and disadvantages to both ways of comparison though.

Visual Gazes

There are several different types of visual gazes, each with an intended  audience. For example familial gazes make the audience think of memories or familiar things. An example of this is finding your son's baseball mitt and ball on the table, which brings back memories of when you first learned to play ball with your own dad. Another type of gaze is a consumer gaze, which makes the audience want to buy things. When I was little I was really into Pokemon, and when my mom took me to Walmart I would always ask for a pack of cards because they set them out on the bottom shelf near the check out isles, right where I could see them. There are many more kinds of gazes, such as political which makes the audience feel more politically aligned to a party, or national gazes that can make us feel more patriotic. All of these serve to make a reader feel a certain way towards something. It can be very useful in advertising, commercials and especially writing. As a writer you want your reader to think in a certain way towards your work and using different rhetorical gazes can do this.

Cause and Effect

One of the most important tools in writing is cause and effect. Cause and effect is important because it helps the audience with logical sequence. It helps to map out events in an order that is easy for the reader to understand. If an author doesn't use cause and effect in a narrative, the story can get very confusing.

One way you can analyze cause and effect is by first identifying the main events. Then you can find causal chains leading up to and after the main events. Once you find the big events, then you can focus on finding what caused them.

Peer Review

Personally I love peer reviews. It gives me a chance to show my work to my potential audience and get input on how I can improve it. It helps me see any passages that might be confusing because a lot of the time, when I write I automatically assume the reader knows as much as I do about the subject, when in reality they might need a bit of background information. It also gives me a chance to see where I should expand and maybe add some more examples or details.

I think one downfall of peer reviews though is that a lot of times people don't give as much input as they could because they're afraid of being mean. It's ok if you mark up someones paper a ton, we're all grown ups here, we can handle a little constructive critism. You're not doing the writer any favors if you hand them back an unmarked essay. They need to know the areas they should work on. Everyone has things they could improve, but a lot of the time it's hard to see mistakes in your own writing.

Rhetorical Tools

Today in class we talked about a few different rhetorical tools used in narratives. The first was mutability/plasticity. This means the ways the material can be reshaped for different audiences. Plasticity is used all the time in writing, because authors write to try to reach an audience. Sometimes the writing needs to be tweaked a little to better suit a particular audience.  The next one  was piecmeal, which is the way a narrative has been assembled from many different sources and put together. Many writers get  information for their works from a lot of different sources and mold bits of them together to form the tale they want. Windows of opportunity are gaps that can can be filled with other stories or perspectives that might not have been included in the original story. It's like the untold section of a well known story, for example Merlin's childhood and teenage years. Most people know who Merlin is, but not much has been recorded historically about his childhood, which leads into the last tool. The last tool we talked about was open-ended closure, which means that if the reader wants more than what is provided for him, then he's going to have to find it for himself by making it up or even possibly writing it. So if a reader wanted to know more about Merlin's childhood years, the reader could make up his own version of how Merlin grew up or write his own story about the adventures he might have had.

When I first learned about rhetorical tools, I automatically thought of classic fairy tales. I can't think of any other collection of stories that has been retold as many times or in as many different ways. They definitely use all the tools mentioned above. For example,  "The Little Mermaid". The disney version has been molded to better suit a younger audience than the original tale, so it's more kid friendly. The story line is made up of bits and pieces of a couple differents versions of the story, therefore showing an example of piecemeal, and there is a window of opportunity left open because the audience could wonder what happens to Ariel after she marries Prince Eric? Someone must have not been able to stand that open-ended closure, because now there are 2 new "Little Mermaid" movies explaining both Ariel's childhood and her life after she gets married.

Characters Cont.

After thinking about the importance of characters in narratives for the past few days, I've come up with another, possibly better example, than " The Princess Bride". My example is Ethan Hunt from the Mission Impossible series.  His character as a spy affects everything, the plot, setting, theme, all of it. As a spy for IMF, he takes on seemingly impossible missions which is the basis for the plots in all of the movies. The plot is centered around his specific character. Spies seem to travel a lot so the settings for these shows are often in foreign places all over the world, and of course a spy is only as good as his gadgets, which puts the time at present so the tools he uses can be a little more futuristic.

Characters are key to any narrative. Without them, a story would  be like coloring a picture with only a white crayon. You'd have the complete outline, but no real color, nothing to catch the eye. Characters catch the reader. We cheer with the heroes, curse the villians and even fall in love with some of them. Plots and themes revolve around characters and their actions. They affect every part of narrative, which is what makes them one of the essential elements of a narrative.

Characters

Out of all the essential narrative elements we discussed yesterday, I find characters to be the most intriguing. Without characters it'd be hard to write a story. They keep the audience interested and entertained. I love how characters can change, like in a book series where you watch the characters grow and mature. When you see a character overcome so many obstacles, you start to relate to them and feel like you know them. Well at least I do anyways. It's also fun when a character you thought you knew really well surprises you by acting in a different way.

The best example I can think of right now that illustrates this would be "The Princess Bride". Wesley, the main character, changes from being a simple farm boy to becoming a sword wielding, damsel rescuing hero. His character completely changes and it's the change that has all the other characters interested in him. Wesley keeps the audience on their toes guessing as to his identity also. His character changes from being mundane and predictable to exciting and adventurous.