Writing log 2a

I found the most interesting part of Chapter 1 was the part describing concept #3 “Good writers think rhetorically about purpose, audience, and genre.” starting on page 14. This concept is about persuading readers to accept what you are saying, taking into account your purpose for writing, what type of audience your writing is aimed at, and the structure of the type of document you are writing. If you are writing a story that you plan on telling to young children, such as a teacher writing a story for her kindergarten class, you would want to keep in mind that they most likely aren’t going to understand any political references or subtle jokes referring to something that happened before they were old enough to remember. I liked this concept, because it is something I don’t always pay attention to and need to try and do more of in my writing. When I first started using my email I would usually just email a teacher and say “Hey I didn’t come to class cause I was really sick today” and until the first day of class I didn’t realize you are supposed to treat emails as if they are a letter or that different writing has that different of structure in how they are put together. I also am sometimes bad at taking into consideration what the reader knows, not always explaining things that they might need to know. Such as when I was writing my research paper last year, I talked about certain terms the average reader not knowing anything about my topic might not understand, and thinking back, I should have defined the term before using it throughout the essay as a general term.

Where it describes Open-Form Prose on page 8 of chapter one I was not surprised to find my own interpretation of “A Festival of Rain” to be wrong. “through which a point emerges suggestively” I never found out what the point was, and after reading it I still don’t know what the writer was talking about by “selling” you the rain. Open Prose does not have a single summarizing thesis and the main point of the writing may sometimes be up for debate. Such as when my English teachers would always try to point out the “real” meaning behind the reading of “The adventures of Huckleberry Fin” being the author making fun of the racism of the south. Whether that was the point the author was trying to convey or not we’ll never truly know since he’s dead. For all you know the author could have not even had any underlying meaning to make fun of racism, and people just inferred that on their own, because they were looking for an underlying meaning. Personally I hate Open-Form Prose, and would much rather everyone who has a point they want to get across to just say it right from the start, or say it right at the end, just so long as they say it to make it obvious.

After reading this chapter I think there is a possibility some of my professors took there time responding to me, or didn’t even respond to some of my emails, because I didn’t take into consideration the different structure of emails compared to a typical message you’d send to someone on Facebook. They might have thought I was a very impolite person, or a person with limited brain power for not knowing how to compose an email with the proper structure. This is not typically the way I would want to come across to the people in charge of grading my papers. Although if I was sending a message to someone on Facebook and I addressed him as, Dear Bob and closed it with sincerely Patrick, he’d probably think I had no social skills, and was a nerdy stay at home with no friends.