Writing Effective Essays
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| The following questions are designed to help you strengthen the rhetoric of any essay. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and all rhetoric has three basic interactive elements: subject, audience, and purpose. |
From Joseph From Trimmer Writing With a Purpose |
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Guidelines for Evaluating Your Subject
1. What do I know about my subject? Do I know about my subject in some depth, or do I need to learn more about it? What are the sources of my knowledge—direct experience, observation, reading? How does my knowledge give me a special or unusual perspective on my subject?
2. What is the focus of my subject? Is my subject too general? How can I restrict it to a more specific subject that I can develop in greater detail?
3. What is significant about my subject? What issues of general importance does it raise? What fresh insight can I contribute to my reader’s thinking on this issue?
4. What is interesting about my subject? Why is this subject interesting to me? How can I interest my readers in it?
5. Is my subject manageable? Can I write about my subject in a particular form, within a certain number of pages? Do I feel in control of my subject or confused by it? If my subject is too complicated or too simplistic, how can I make it more manageable?
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Guidelines for Analyzing Your Audience
1. Who are the readers that will be most interested in my writing? What is their probable age, sex, education, economic status, and social position? What values, assumptions, and prejudices characterize their general attitudes toward life?
2. What do my readers know or think they know about my subject? What is the probable source of their knowledge—direct experience, observation, reading, rumor? Will my readers react positively or negatively toward my subject?
3. Why will my readers read my writing? If they know a great deal about my subject, what will they expect to learn from reading my essay? If they know only a few things about my subject, what will they expect to be told about it? Will they expect to be entertained, informed, or persuaded?
4. How can I interest my readers in my subject? If they are hostile toward it, how can I convince them to give my writing a fair reading? If they are sympathetic, how can I fulfill and enhance their expectations? If they are neutral, how can I catch and hold their attention?
5. How can I help my reader read my writing? What kind of organizational pattern will help them see its purpose? What kind of guideposts and transitional markers will they need to follow this pattern? What (and how many) examples will they need to understand my general statements? What evidence will they need to be convinced by my argument?
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Guidelines for Determining Your Purpose
1. What are the requirements of my writing project? If I am writing to fulfill an assignment, do I understand that assignment? If I am writing on my own, do I have definite expectations of what I will accomplish?
2. As I proceed in this project, what do I need to know? Do I have a good understanding of my subject, or do I need more information? Have I considered the possible audiences who might want to read my writing?
3. What hypothesis can I use as my working purpose? How many different hypotheses can I formulate about my subject? Which of them seems to direct and control my information in the most effective manner?
4. What purpose have I discovered for this writing project? Has my purpose changed as I learned more about my subject and audience? If so, in what ways? Have I discovered, by working with a hypothesis or hypotheses, what I want to do in my writing?
5. What is my thesis? How can I state my main idea about my subject in a thesis sentence? Does my thesis limit the scope of my writing to what I can demonstrate in the available space? Does it focus my writing on one specific assertion? Does it make an exact statement about what my writing intends to do?
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