PART II—OUTCOMES AND GOALS
Chapter 3—Rhetorical Knowledge
When many people today think of the word rhetoric, they associate it with empty or
deceptive speech. You might have even heard someone say of a politician, “That speech
was nothing but empty rhetoric.” That isn’t the way writing teachers use the word.
Instead, writing teachers are thinking of how writers understand what they are going to
write, who it should be written for, what the consequences of their words could be, and
more.
Rhetorical Knowledge is the first of the Council of Writing Program Administrators’
Statement of Outcomes and Goals for students finishing a first-year composition course
or sequence of courses. As you can see from chapter 2, Rhetorical Knowledge includes at
least the following:
Learning to focus on a purpose
Responding to the needs of different audiences
Learning how to use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the
rhetorical situation
Learning how to adopt the appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality for your
writing
Understanding how genres shape reading and writing
Learning to write in several different genres
This chapter should help you think through these goals so that when you do make
decisions in your own writing, you are aware of the rhetorical possibilities and limits for
different writing assignments or situations.
3.1 Purpose
Before beginning, it is helpful to decide on a purpose for your writing. Do you want to
inform your audience of a certain topic, persuade them to think a certain way about a
subject, instruct them, entertain them? Often writing serves more than one purpose, but
the primary purpose of your composition should come through clearly. Much academic
writing, for example, is informative but also includes a persuasive undercurrent. You
might want to entertain as well as convince.
It is very possible that your teacher will assign you a purpose in the same way that a
newspaper editor assigns different kinds of stories to reporters. For example, if your
teacher asks you to analyze or explain how a particular essay or photograph works, your
purpose is already spelled out for you. Or, you might be asked to transcribe and report
on an interview you have done. Again, your purpose is assigned, and your job is to keep
that purpose in mind as you write.
Take time, when you get an assignment, to figure out what the assignment is asking for
and how the assignment will determine the purpose of your text . Pay attention to words
in the assignment that signal purpose— summarize, describe, explain, analyze, narrate, or
evaluate critically. Each of these words indicates a very different kind of paper.
Notice how first-year Virginia Tech student Da Jung “Carol” Cho explains why she
decided to write about how Americans are seen from outside this country. The
assignment (see sidebar) asked her to explain a current stereotype and argue for the
importance of drawing attention to the stereotype. She was to write an introduction to
the topic and then create a comic explaining the stereotype and arguing for its importance.
You can see, then, that her purpose was two-fold. In the following Cho explains the
purpose of her project in her introduction and then illustrates it in the comics she created.
Writing About Stereotypes—The Assignment
Student: Da Jung “Carol” Cho
Teacher: Diana George
Diana: For this assignment,
students were asked to read the
graphic memoir Persepolis by
Marjane Satrapi. In it, Satrapi tells
the story of growing up in
revolutionary Iran. She begins her
memoir with an introduction that
gives her readers background
information on Iran as well as on
how Iranians tend to be stereotyped
in the rest of the world. The story is
then told in the form of a graphic
novel—like comics. The students then watched Edward Said speak on Orientalism. In his
talk, Said tells his audience that he felt compelled to tell stories of the Middle East and to
correct stereotypes of Middle Eastern men and women because, he says, the people he
saw on the news and in movies were not people he recognized from growing up there.
For their project, students were to choose a stereotype that they considered an important
one for others to recognize and understand. They were to follow Satrapi’s model and
begin with an introduction explaining why the stereotype they chose was important.
They were also to provide any background information their readers might need to
understand the stereotype. Then, they were to explain their stereotype in graphic novel
or comics form.
Da Jung: One of the goals that Professor George asked on this project was to show why
the topic is important to talk about. To achieve the goal, I tried to think that the project
was not an English class assignment; instead; it was an opportunity to share what I care
about. The incident in the comic was in my mind for years. I read and heard from media,
thought about it alone, discussed it with my friends and family, and thought about it
more. This paper means a lot to me. I really wanted to talk about the topic and I used the
assignment as an opportunity to discuss it with class instead of choosing the topic just
for homework.
“News from Korea,” Da Jung “Carol” Cho
On September 11, 2001, when I was still in Korea, I watched on TV an airplane
crash into the World Trade Center. I was surprised that it happened in real life, but it did
happen. That accident did not really affect me. Just like on a normal day, I woke up at six
o’clock in the morning, went to school, and had fun.
In that same year in December when I moved to America, the 9/11 incident
influenced me greatly. Beginning with airport questionnaires, there were many limitations
on my life. I could not go to school for three months. I could not go outside of America,
even when I had a school field trip and when my uncle who lived in Korea died. However,
the limitation that I had was nothing compared to my friend. Lina, my Afghanistan friend
from my high school English as a Second Language class said that whenever she went to
public places, like museums in Washington, D.C., she was searched longer than other
people. What made life harder for Lina was not the government regulations, though. Lina
could not stand it when people treated her family and friends as terrorists. From 9/11 and
Lina, I realized how important the relationship between America and Korea is to me. If
the terrorists were Koreans, I might still be at home and people might treat me as a
terrorist. Since I am an immigrant, I have to be aware of the relationship between America
and Korea.
I want America and Korea to have an affable relationship because I belong to both
countries. I cannot be happy when the two countries become enemies. To make that
affable relationship, I need to do something. I cannot sit back, do nothing, and say, “I am
so little and weak.” I believe that I am a representation of Korea to Americans and a
representation of America to Koreans. As a representative of both countries, my role
between these two countries is important. If there is a misunderstanding or if there is a
problem that one side is not aware of, I need to be able to explain it to people. I may not
talk to many people, and they might not agree with me. However, I will still talk because
there might be one person who understands what is happening and who can do a better
job to let people know.
It is hard to know the images that people of other countries have about Americans
when you are inside America. The image that Americans have of themselves can be very
different from what people outside of the country think. This image is influenced by the
political relationship between countries. In Korea, the image of America is not good
because of several accidents in Korea and because of the war in Iraq. The image of
America that Koreans have is similar to Hitler, Caesar, or a demanding dictator.
I care about Korea, and I care about America. I want people in both countries to
have a genial image of each other. This is why this assignment is important to me. I may
be small and not influential, but I want to fix this dictator-like image. This comic is one of
the small things that I can do.
In her essay, Cho states her purpose strongly. Because she sees herself as a
“representative of both [the United States and Korea],” she wishes to improve the
communication between the two countries by explaining the image of the United States in
South Korea. As she states, “the image the Americans have of themselves can be very
different from what people outside the country think”; an image which is affected by
Korean history, the continuing presence of the United States in Korea, and the war in
Iraq. Her project seeks to explain how history and ongoing relations have shaped this
image. To do that, Cho tells her story of hearing news about two young South Korean
girls killed by military tanks, and the unresponsive reaction of the U.S. military. She
explains the “Status of Force Agreement,” and the history which led to this agreement
which forbids the Korean government to investigate US soldiers’ crimes. Her comic
poses many difficult questions, ones which she despairs that she “[can] not find answers
[to].”
3.2 Audience
Although in a writing class you may feel as though your audience is always your
instructor, often you will engage in many different types of writing, including informal
writing which is mostly done for you to figure out your own thinking about a topic. You
may also be asked to direct writing to your classmates. Any presentation you give to the
class makes the class a very real audience. There are also times when an assignment
reaches outside of the classroom, and you may be asked to write to an audience such as an
administrator, faculty member, family member, friend, or organization.
The more real you can envision your audience, the easier it will be for you to choose the
appropriate language, level of formality, kinds of information, and form for your
composition.
As you write, ask yourself these questions:
Who am I writing to or for? Who will read or listen to what I’ve written?
What do they already know about my topic? What do they need to know?
What are some strategies I can use to make them interested in my topic?
What language would I not use?
How formal or informal can I be?
What can I say in my paper that will really connect to this audience?
Your answers to those questions will help you determine what you should say, how you
should say it, and how you represent yourself in your writing. In other words, knowing
your audience will also allow you to work consciously on the tone or style (voice) of
your writing and will help you decide what you must say and what you should probably
leave out. It will also help you decide on the type (or, genre) of writing that will best suit
the situation. For example, email works well with friends but is very bad for formal
business deal. As well, while you might be comfortable using IM language in an email
message to friends, you would not use the same to a teacher, a business associate, or
someone you don’t know well.
Cho’s audience for her project was her 1105 class in the Fall of 2005 at Virginia Tech.
She knew she was going to have to present her work to her classmates and argue for why
she thought it was important for American students to understand a prevailing stereotype
in South Korea. She also knew that her audience might not be entirely happy with this
topic or this way of seeing Americans, so she was careful to explain situations that
contributed to the negative image.
Understanding your audience
Even though Cho had been with the class for eleven weeks before she began this
project, she knew very few of them well. Like most first-year students, she knew
them as people in the same course working with the same material. She didn’t
know them as well as she knew high school friends or friends back in Korea or
family members. So, how could she best address this audience?
Well, she did know some things about her classmates. She knew that they all were
writing on the same assignment, and so some of them would be eager to see how
others in the class handled the task. She knew the students she had worked closely
with in group assignments and could count on some of them for feedback. She
knew that some of her classmates were from different countries and backgrounds
but that most were Americans and some were members of the Corps of Cadets.
She didn’t want to offend them because she wanted to be able to talk to all of
them, and she wanted them to learn something from her.
In many ways, this is both an easy and a tricky audience. (For example, one of her
Cadet classmates wrote about how cadets are stereotyped as all being alike, all
with the same politics, when they are individuals with individual goals, ideas, and
affiliations.) She had to be careful not to stereotype her audience by assuming
they would all agree or disagree with what she had to say.
Ethos, Logos, Pathos [sidebar definition of each?]
Cho uses rhetorical appeals such as ethos, pathos, and logos in order to build her
relationship with her audience. She uses ethos, a term used to describe the act of
demonstrating to an audience that you are a good and trustworthy writer or
speaker, when she shares with them her motives for writing: “I care about Korea,
and I care about America.” Later, she reminds her audience that she represents
America to Koreans and Korea to Americans and that she can’t be happy in
America if the two countries are enemies. Her comic opens with a depiction of
herself as a college student in the U.S. talking on the phone with her friend, a scene
certainly familiar to everyone in the class. At the end of the strip, she worries over
her mother’s reaction to her phone bill returning her audience to a familiar and
possibly even comforting situation, compared to the seriousness of the rest of the
strip.
Cho uses pathos, or emotion, to move her audience to accept what she is writing
about. Notice that she begins her introduction with a reference to 9/11, and she
says that when she heard about it from Korea, the event surprised her, but she
wasn’t really affected by it because it seemed so far away and so disassociated
from her life. This event is paralleled by her story of the two children run over by
an American tank. She watches the news in America and thinks Americans must
not care because the incident doesn’t even rate a headline.
These two stories set up an emotional relationship with Cho. At first, readers are
likely to be put off by the fact that she doesn’t feel connected to the events of
9/11. Later, she hopes that her readers will understand that they, too, are often
unaffected by tragedies on distant shores. In her comic, she includes photos of the
young girls killed in Korea by army tanks, and even draws a scene of a distraught
mother, who pleads, “’Bring Back My Daughter!’” In these ways Cho invites her
audience to feel some of the sorrow she feels and to take a lesson from those
feelings. The photographs are particularly moving because, unlike her drawings
which depict generalized people and scenes, these photographs of the two
children killed look like their school pictures. They are real children who had real
lives cut short.
Cho uses logos (making a convincing argument using empirical knowledge or
reasoning) when she relates details of the Korean war in her comic strip. The
history of the Korean war is familiar to us, so by explaining it from her
perspective, she adds another layer onto an already familiar time in history. She
intersperses news photos of the South Korean reaction to the girls’ deaths. These
photos, though they also draw on emotion, stand as evidence of how the event
was received in Korea. The history, information, and evidence she presents allow
her to create a persuasive argument for the importance of understanding the
situation between the US and Korea.
3.3 Rhetorical Situation
Different situations and circumstances actually call for different kinds of rhetorical
responses. Lloyd Bitzer described a rhetorical situation as a situation that demands a
response. For example, a funeral normally calls for a eulogy, a speech that praises the
worthiness of the person who has passed away. Most people would say that it would be
out of place to stand up and criticize the deceased or to deliver a comic bashing of the
family. Instead, the typical rhetorical response in a funeral is to remember the deceased
fondly, to comfort the living, and to leave the audience with a sense that the world
mourns the loss of but celebrates the life of the person about to be buried.
Of course, the rhetorical situation cannot determine the exact response or the form of that
response, but the situation does make a difference in what you are able to write or say
and what form it should take.
How did Cho respond to the rhetorical situation posed for her? What was that situation?
Situation/Exigence
The immediate situation that demanded a response (what Bitzer calls the exigence)
was the fact that Cho’s teacher had given her a specific assignment that had to be
presented to her classmates in a oral report and that had to be turned in to the
teacher for a final grade.
That is the rhetorical situation students find themselves in when they take a
writing class. Papers are assigned. The requirements of the paper are set out by
the teacher. To get a grade, you have to complete the assignment.
Going beyond the requirement—further exigence
For Carol, however, there was more.
When she wrote her paper and created the comic, Cho had only been in this
country for four years. She still had strong ties to South Korea and still worked
hard to write in this second language. Moreover, she knew that many of the U.S.
students she was in class with didn’t know much about her country and often
treated her like someone they couldn’t relate well to.
As well, the class had been reading the graphic memoir Persepolis in which
Marjane Satrapi explains how Americans seem to think all Iranians are the same.
They had also watched an interview with Edward Said who said that, when he
saw American depictions of Palestinians, he did not recognize his countryfolk.
The stereotypes were too limiting.
Cho wanted very badly for her classmates to understand that they, too, were
engaging in limiting stereotypes just as she had when she lived in Korea. She
needed a powerful story to explain that.
3.4 Adopting the Appropriate Voice or Level of Formality
Notice that Cho is addressing an important subject that is also personal to her. She is
writing directly to her teacher and her classmates, so she wants them to relate to what she
is saying. Her introduction, then, introduces the reader to her, provides necessary
background information for understanding the comic that will follow, and it gives a reason
for wanting to teach Americans about Koreans.
Her voice—or the tone of her introduction—is not chatty or overly familiar, but it is less
formal than a history of Korean/American relations or a report on politics in South Korea
would be. Cho is straddling a line between familiarity and the presentation of information.
Once she shifts into her comic, Cho is even more familiar and informal except when she
tells the story of the children who are killed. Again, she is aiming for acceptance from her
readers through the impression that she, like them, is a college student who responds to
events from home in the same way they would. She also, however, shifts into a more
reportorial voice when she explains the event and the press’s response to it. Notice that
her response is even less formal as she watches TV news but more formal when she
allows the news to speak.
3.5 How Genres Shape Reading and Writing
You will have noticed that Cho’s project takes advantage of two separate genres: the
written introduction and comics.
The Introduction
The assignment asked Cho and her classmates to write an introduction “of the sort
that Marjane Satrapi wrote to introduce Persepolis, her graphic memoir. Satrapi
had written, “ . . .” You can see, then, that Cho (as well as many of her
classmates) used Satrapi’s form to help them write their own introductions. The
introduction had to give the reader a an idea of who was writing and why. It had to
given enough background so that the comic made sense. It had to be brief and not
take over the project. It also had to give the reader a reason to go on to the comics.
Da Jung “Carol” Cho took all of this into account in her introduction.
The Comics
Because the assignment called for Cho to create comics that would then carry the
rest of her meaning, she had to decide what she could say in panels that were
primarily visual and that couldn’t contain too much writing. This genre (and
medium) had to carry the story primarily through pictures without losing the
importance of the point Cho wanted to make. Comics are often associated with
lighthearted stories, but graphic novels can be darker and more serious. Notice that
Cho has incorporated the lighthearted aspect briefly at the end of the comic, but
she has primarily taken her cue from Satrapi and other graphic novelists to tell a
very serious story.
Comics are also more associated with storytelling (narrative) than with the essay
form. You might notice that, while Cho does make a point with her story, it is still
in the form of a story. That is likely influenced by the comics form.
If Cho had been asked to write an analysis of Americanl/Korean relations, that form
would have shaped her work in a very different way. Pay attention to the form or kind
(genre) of writing you are being asked to do, and let that genre help shape the way you
handle your information.
3.6 Learning to Write in Several Genres
You are likely to be asked to produce several different kinds of compositions in your
first-year courses. You could be asked to write journal entries, reports, transcripts of
interviews, film reviews, film or literary analysis, summaries, arguments, profiles,
memoirs, and more.
Each of these genres has its separate demands and conventions. Just make sure you pay
attention to the type of writing you are being asked to do. Some of that writing will also
include visual composition. Much of it will be the basis for an oral presentation, as well.
Each form demands that you make different decisions about what you can (or cannot)
present and how it is presented.
All of this work adds up to Rhetorical Awareness, an important component of becoming a
writer who has control of the material and the presentation of that material.