Rhetorical Devices

Purpose:

Purpose was one of the most important rhetorical devices that I wrote about throughout all my projects and my reflection papers. Understanding the purpose of the assignment allowed me to write a coherent paper where I discussed, “Why write this paper?”

At the beginning of the semester we wrote a letter to the teacher about who we are and what we plan on accomplishing during the semester, but the true meaning of purpose never really occurred to me until the end of the semester. The purpose of that assignment, partially, was to introduce yourself to the professor, but also to compare that letter to our project proposals to see how I have progressed as a writer. Towards the beginning of the semester, the purpose of this class was to get an A+, but now I realize that the purpose of this class was to learn how to write like an engineer where in the future I will be writing project proposals, lab reports, and technical descriptions. In my reflection piece about my technical description, I wrote “The purpose of my technical description was to educate high school, college student, and engineers on the usages and abilities of the Master Vernier Caliper. The reason I wrote this was because as a future engineer it is important to be able to use a Master Vernier Caliper when working in the field”. After taking notes in class on the true reason for purpose, I came up with my idea and discussed why I am writing about this tool. In the beginning of the semester I would have never written something like this. But when writing this assignment, I realized the true reason of this document was to educate those who don’t know what a Vernier Caliper is and to encourage future engineers to make precise measurements using this tool. That is why I wrote steps on how to use it, its functions/usages, and a detailed description of its parts.

Audience:

Audience is one of the most important factors when writing as an engineer because each proposal or report needs to be addressed to a specific person or group. For example, my group chose Survival Pods and the audience was the Japanese Public Safety Department of the Federal Government and the citizens of Japan that lives near coastal areas. Also, for my Pendulum Lab Report, “The audience of this lab is any engineer or student taking physics as a science class. I wrote this lab to incorporate specific data and calculations that are important for the understanding of the lab. Those who haven’t taken or are not taking physics at the moment would still understand the lab because I have explained each part in detail.” Each project needed to have a primary and secondary audience so that each is informed on the plan that the proposal is trying to push forward. Along with the people that will be effected, each proposal will be sent to engineers that are willing to join this effort. After each assignment, multiple audience analysis sheets were written so that the reader understands who the paper is for. For example, below in Figure 1 the audience is the Japanese government and the audience profile sheet describes: the reader’s job title, the kind of reader, the reader’s level of education, the reader’s professional experience, the reader’s responsibilities, the reader’s attitude towards the subject and the writer, and the experience of the reader based on the given topic at hand. Through both assignments the audience impacts the purpose and content where each audience has a different viewpoint on the topic at hand.

Along with this, knowing the audience also calls for a different level of either casual or professional writing. Since engineering is a very professional career, their writing needs to be very detailed and in a manner that distinguishes themselves from other engineers. Sometimes, on the other hand, the audience can also be average people who are also reading the proposed document and therefore the engineers need to write in a less scientific tone of speech where the people can read and understand this. For our group’s lab report, the project needed to be tailored to those who couldn’t understand certain scientific formalities and data.

Figure 1

Stance:

The rhetorical element of stance is the attitude towards the topic at hand. How passionate you are about the proposed topic? That was the question our group asked themselves during every project when researching and when actually composing the document. From the beginning, I understood my stance for writing certain proposals and descriptions because it was my passion to become a Mechanical Engineer.

At the beginning of the Technical Description paper, my stance was that many people (including engineers) didn’t know what a Vernier Caliper was. My mission, in that case, was to inform the people as best as I could by using images and using a different tone that allowed for others, besides engineers, to understand what the tool is and what it is used for? In my reflection I wrote this, “I was thinking about how to write this piece, whether in the form of a complete essay, in summation form, or like a pamphlet. I chose to break the technical description down into parts using subtitles and headings so that the information isn’t too overwhelming for those reading the assignment.” The way I set up my technical description was smart because I broke it up into sections so that it is easier to read. What’s better: sections or one full essay? Throughout the rest of the semester, our group specified their stance in the reflection paper and in each essays by showing how passionate we are with each topic and we described each topic is detail so that everyone understands why we are so passionately writing about these topics.

Genre:

            Out of every rhetorical device, genre has been my biggest problem. As a first semester freshman I did not understand what kinds of papers we would be writing. The genre was very vague to me and I struggle with this, till this day. I had to draft my work about 3 times before submitting my final assignment, mostly organizational and content based. The hardest genre piece for me, was the lab report because everyone else has written lab reports on a college level except for me and a few other kids. I was still struggling with APA and this just made writing difficult where my organization was very erratic. I had a very weak start in this area where most of my draft work’s problems were organizational based. Today, I have gotten better at this but am not quite comfortable yet.

For my lab report we wrote this, “From this lab, we see how acceleration due to gravity really works in society where everyone no matter their weight is pulled down to the ground where we have a limited jumping ability and can never float on Earth. Through the calculations of the pendulum lab we figure out how to calculate acceleration due to gravity in a small setting such as a laboratory. We figured out that acceleration due to gravity is proportional to length but not to angle or mass. We calculated our acceleration to be 10.275 m/s^2 and our percent error to be 4.7%.” This, from my Pendulum Lab, describes the genre which is a lab report which is a description of the procedure, materials, abstract, and the results/analysis of the lab. In my group’s project proposal I wrote this in the introduction, “This is a major problem and the new and improved Survival Pod can solve this by cutting the death rate and injury rate dramatically. All a citizen has to do is go outside into their designated capsule, jump in and relax. The spherical airplane-grade aluminum is virtually indestructible where it will withstand the initial impact of a natural disaster, as well as sharp object penetration, heat exposure, blunt object impact, and rapid deceleration. ” This basically describes the genre of this project proposal by showing how the proposal should describe, in detail, the survival pods, should discuss the impact, and discuss why we are writing about this. Through these 2 documents, you can see how I have been able to figure out genre, even though it was difficult and differentiate between each assignment. 

Medium/Design:

The medium, the conveying of information to an audience, of each assignment was multimodal and very repetitive. In each case we posted an online summary through blackboard, we wrote to 3 other students and gave them advice on what to include in each proposal, we printed 4 copies of our first draft to give to Professor Carr and our group members for peer review, and finally we gave the final draft to Professor Carr. This was very important because as a group, we found many platforms in which to display our information just like this for my technical description piece.

Figure 2

We started off with summaries of each and took each student reply to fix our final. Then we drafted our work and finally wrote our final piece. For the project portfolio, we began by writing about each Course Learning Outline and then describing how we completed each. After this was completed, we used examples from the whole year to describe how we have evolved as writers.

 

Exigence:

I knew nothing about exigence, but after taking notes on different PowerPoints and through discussions in class I understood that it meant: What, personally, made you write this project? Each assignment that I wrote about, my exigence was different. For my technical approach I discussed how, “I was very enthusiastic about writing about a Vernier caliper because I used it not too long ago, in high school and where I did my internship. In my high school engineering class, I used a Vernier Caliper to take better measurements of a cube that we constructed using a 3-D printer. During my internship, I used a caliper such as the one I explained to measure HVAC systems and create a power point based on my measurements and calculations.” I wrote my technical description based on something I used as a Mechanical Engineer when I was interning in high school. For my lab report I wrote about how I completed the pendulum lab in high school and understood why it was so important. Finally, for my Survival Pod project proposal, I discussed how Hurricane Sandy ruined a good portion of New York and that Survival Pods would eventually stop this.

From the beginning of the semester I had no idea what exigence was, but now I use exigence in all of my writing pieces to display my personal motives for writing.