In Winterowds Beneficence article, he talks about “rhetorical force in rhetoric.” He explains that the way we use force in our sentences can extend into the arguments we make. He first talks about intention. He describes how we as writers and readers cannot completely understand a sentence until we are given an explanation as to what the sentence’s intention is. Winterowd also talks about performatives, which are used to show intention. In Laurence Musgrove’s article The Real Reasons Students Can’t Write, Musgrove makes the final statement “Here’s your badge.” The fact that Musgrove does not use a performative to suggest his intent, such as “I appoint you with your badge,” might suggest that Musgrove’s intent is not to give educators the task of helping students write himself, but instead is suggesting that the task of motivating students has existed all along.
For my historical-causal analysis I am thinking about an idea that deals with a rise in youth violence, and analyze the trend in school shootings such as Columbine and Virginia Tech to see how safe our schools are and what these events could mean for the future of Americas schools. For my real form I think a brochure to send to parents regarding signs of violence in their children, or a ad campaign might be best. The genre form will need to reach both students and parents as well as teachers. The ad campaign and brochure will need to be sensitive to the issue but direct enough to impact the audience.
4 comments:
Brett- I think that your project topic is a very important one, especially to us since we are students that are concerned about our safety. The most important principle that you might want to keep in mind is appeals to pathos- since this could be very useful in a brochere or ad. Although it may seem obvious why school violence is an important topic to discuss and research, it may be hard to convince parents to look at their child's behavior and analyze it. It is not that parents do not care, but most of them do not want to believe that their child could be someone to cause harm to someone else. I am sure you will find a way to express the importance of the issue and convince parents to serioulsy monitor student's behavior.
Best of Luck- Tiffany
I think that you hit on a very important issue and it would be interesting if you focused on either grade school or college campus violence. What kinds of things are being done to stop the violence in either situation? If you focus more on one situation than the other I think it will help to narrow down your audience. You need to decide if you are making future college parents/students aware of campus safety or if you are assuring parents/students in grade school that their teachers and administration can control their environments.
I really like this idea for your project. I think it would be very important, though, to be able to look at the issue from different sides. This is a very controversial issue, especially surrounding media violence, parental responsibility, other students, etc. I'm curious to know if there is one partiular aspect of teen violence that you would focus on, or would it be a generalized brochure?
Maybe you could examine briefly why there is so much violence in schools and not very much violence in other public areas, at least compared to schools.This could be addressed through talking about the real problems with why students are not happy with the people at their school and get at the heart of the issue rather than just trying to solve the problem by doing the same things and making people aware of violence. I think that this is especially important is a teaching major.
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