SLU Rhetorical Situation Discussion

In this writing you will demonstrate your genre, audience, and lexis awareness
by making choices to shape various texts to reflect these concepts.
While you will be provided with one specific scenario, you will need to
respond to several individual rhetorical situations created by this
scenario, composing each required text to a specific audience, following
the conventions of a specific genre, and including appropriate language
for that audience and that genre. Please, label each Rhetorical
Situation clearly with a subheading, and compose your response to it
beneath the subheading. The last subheading will be “Mini-Reflection,”
explained at the end of this prompt.

Here is the scenario:

To
say that today was one of the most disappointing and stressful days of
your life would be an understatement of great proportions. The
assignment you submitted in your English class has been flagged as
plagiarized, and rightfully so. You did copy significant chunks of the
writing from a website, just to quickly submit something and not get a
zero because you procrastinated and then your roommate talked you into
going to the beach for the whole weekend. You have been notified by your
English professor that he was reporting you to the Academic Honesty
Committee, and chances are that you will be suspended for this
infraction. Your basketball scholarship depends on your grades, so now
you are really worried.

Rhetorical Situation 1

You
now have to write a formal letter of apology and email it to your
English professor, as advised by your basketball coach. He is
disappointed with you and hopes that your scholarship is not revoked
because as the team captain, you have inspired many of your teammates
and the outcome of this is clearly visible in the number of games that
the team has been winning lately. As you compose this letter, consider
your audience by deciding what content you should include, what details,
what language should be prevalent in this message, and anything else
that would be appropriate to help you accomplish the purpose of the
letter.

Rhetorical Situation 2

This
stressful day is almost over, but you cannot sleep and reach out for
your diary/journal to record your thoughts that are now keeping you
awake. You have been journaling every night before going to sleep. This
is a commitment you made to yourself as you got accepted to the
university on your basketball scholarship. You thought it would be a
great idea to write down at the moment something that later on in your
life you would be able to reminisce about. Clearly today was rough, so
you are now using the pages so “make sense of it all” in tonight’s
journal entry. Consider the audience, language, details for this journal
entry.

Rhetorical Situation 3

You
cannot sleep and do some searching on your phone about academic
plagiarism, only to stumble upon a blog where people share their stories
about how plagiarism impacted their personal, professional lives, for
some, completely changing the trajectory of their lives. These stories
and the fact that it is now really late are beginning to make you feel
like a profound change is about to happen in your life, and you decide
to add to this open forum for anyone who wishes to share. You post a
detailed account of what happened to you and your feelings about it. As
you compose this entry, consider who the audience is and how you will be
addressing that audience, with what detail, what you will include and
omit from this entry to meet the conventions of a blog.

Rhetorical Situation 4

As
part of your plagiarism awareness training class you are now enrolled
in after your paper was identified as plagiarized, you must write an
essay, supported by sources from the library’s databases, on the topic
of academic dishonesty and its prevalence as well as its consequences in
the academic and the professional field. Write a comprehensive
introduction to this essay, complete with the thesis statement in which
you make an explicit point about plagiarism, citing at least one
peer-reviewed academic source from the databases and including all
sources on the Works Cited page. As you compose this introduction, keep
in mind the conventions of this type of writing, the audience’s
expectations, the details expected in and relevant to an introduction.

Mini-Reflection on Genre, Audience, and Lexis:

Keep
in mind that this Mini-Reflection section will be the longest part of
the entire assignment as it provides a comprehensive look at all the
writing you have completed for it. Please, label this section clearly as
“Mini-Reflection.”

Reflect
on the experience of writing in different genres and for different
audiences in each rhetorical situation. Use the following prompts as a guideline (3 and 5 are mandatory):

1. How did you know what was appropriate for each genre?
2. For each scenario, how did your audience impact what and how you chose to say?
3. Compare
   any two scenarios and discuss the significant differences in rhetorical
   situation (discuss purpose, audience, intended outcome, and
   appropriateness of writing style and lexis for each).
4. How does your understanding of genre, audience, lexis, and rhetorical situation influence the choices you make in writing?
5. What
   aspects of this assignment can you apply to writing assignments you are
   currently working on in any other classes? In other words, what did you
   learn by completing this assignment that you can now transfer to
   another writing situation?