The Reading-Writing Connection

1. The Reading-Writing Connection What’s Rhetoric Got to Do with Writing?

2. Understanding Your Writing Task • What have you been assigned to do? • How do you want to shape your readers’ understanding of your subject? • How can you shape your rhetoric effectively and efficiently?

3. inform explain describe define defend entertain evaluate persuade prove classify report explore convince analyze propose compare argue observe formulate Look for “Does” Verbs

4. Purpose, Audience, and Subject Why are you writing? Who are your imagined readers? Does your imagined audience affect what you are writing about? Consider: • age • gender • education • values and beliefs • prior knowledge about topic • attitude toward topic • expectations

5. Try This: You went to a party on Saturday night and didn’t go to bed at all. In the next few days (after recovering from your killer headache), you have several people to talk to. Discuss your weekend activities with the following audiences: • Your mother • Your best friend • Your significant other (who attends another school) • Your advisor • A classmate • Your pastor or counselor • Your elderly neighbor

6. Practical Writing Strategies: Generating Ideas • Journal writing • Brainstorming • Clustering • Freewriting • Looping • Questioning

7. Practical Writing Strategies: Tentative Thesis Your tentative thesis is the main idea you will develop as you write. While this thesis will be revised and tailored to the requirements of your assignment, at the earliest stages of writing, a controlling idea needs to be formulated so you can organize and draft.  Look over your ideas you’ve generated. What concepts, terms, and ideas seem significant? Can you say more about any of these ideas?

8. Practical Writing Strategies: Organizing Your Ideas Scratch outlining Drafting Responding

9. What’s the difference between…. • Revising: “seeing again”; deals with the broadest issues of purpose, audience, organization, introduction, conclusion, and detail • Editing: deals with small-scale issues such as the length, structure, and variety of your sentences and paragraphs; diction; transitions; punctuation • Proofreading: focuses on surface-level problems such as typos, misspellings, and word spacing BDon’t rely solely on spell check or grammar check for editing or proofreading. Spell checkers don’t catch everything, and grammar checkers are almost always incorrect.