Rhetorical Knowledge

Rhetorical knowledge focuses on the available means of persuasion, considering factors such as context, audience, purpose, genre, medium, and conventions.

• Explore and use with purpose key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of written texts. These concepts include:
  • Rhetorical situation: purpose, audience, context
  • Genre
  • Argumentation: controlling purpose, evidence
• Develop an understanding of the ways in which rhetorical concepts can be transferred to multimodal artifacts
• Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes
• Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure

Critical Thinking, Writing, and Composing

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate ideas, information, situations, and texts.

• Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, critical thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts
• Read a diverse range of written texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations
• Use strategies—such as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign—to compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those from appropriate sources

Processes

Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, finalize, and distribute projects. Composing processes are recursive and adaptable in

relation to different rhetorical situations. Understand that writing is a process

• Develop a writing project through multiple stages
• Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing
• Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas
• Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
• Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress
• Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence their work

Knowledge of Conventions

Conventions are the formal rules and informal guidelines that define genres, and in so doing, shape readers’ and writers’ perceptions of correctness or appropriateness.

• Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising readers’ and writers’ perceptions of correctness or appropriateness
• Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of written texts
• Explore the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions