Thlog week 2

Over this week, we have learnt a lot of stuff spanning many aspects of writing. We learnt about rhetoric, rhetorical situation, rhetorical analysis, argument, oxford comma, dash and hyphens, and etc. Among them, personally, I found rhetorical situation and dash vs. hyphens are two interesting and meaningful topics, and thus I decide to mainly address them in this thlog.

Rhetoric is, according to our reading, “the way we use language and images to persuade” (pg.38 in reader). So the goal of rhetorical analysis is to dissect the approaches rhetors use to make their argument persuasive. In order to do so, we look at its rhetorical situation, or context. There are three elements constituting the context—namely, exigence, audience and constraints.  Exigence is the reason why we have to write. For instance, we see many charitable ads around us which advocate protecting environments and condemn the industry for releasing excessive CO2 into the atmosphere. Apparently, the appearance of these ads is attributed to the global warming and therefore it is the exigence, the circumstance or condition that asks for a response. Next component is audience—the recipients of the rhetorical message. I think this part shares the same idea of marketing in media, such as advertisements. The advertisement of a commodity always has its intended customers, and only can an advertisement finding and appealing to this certain population be productive and persuasive. The same principle is applied in writing as well. If we want to persuade someone, first of all, we have to know who is the someone. The last piece of rhetorical situation is the constraints. Constraints can be various thing, such as beliefs, attitudes or traditions. “The constraints will affect the way discourse is delivered or communicated.” (pg 41)In our PB1B, we are required to discuss three specific genres, and it is a constraint. I think, rhetorical situation is a core concept when we come to discuss a particular genre and its conventions because it helps you understand how conventions form and work.

In addition to conceptual knowledge, we were also taught some practical knowledge. It will help us clearly structure our sentence that knowing how to employ dashes and hyphen properly. Hyphens combine two single words into a new word, making the meaning understood more readily by readers. Dashes function in a sentence almost the same way as commas, which means breaking thoughts or adding details. However, dashes can invite a pause inside a single sentence separating the whole phrase into several parts. By doing so, dashes make the author’s primary idea flow more fluently. Moreover, if we only use commas, within one sentence, author’s secondary idea will be intertwined together with the main one; using dashes can effectively avoid such confusing situation.