TA: Practice Makes Perfect

In class we have been talking a lot about rhetoric and audience awareness. I really like the ideas of the WATCO questions and also of enthymemes but I will admit that they are actually a lot harder to do than I had thought. I really liked learning about these things because I can see how this will be helpful in writing letters of persuasion. The thing I struggled with the most was the “because clause.” I am not sure why but for some reason the first enthymemes I did had no “because clauses” which kind of defeats the purpose I now realize. Oops! I also really like the idea of reader rights. I am not quite sure if I have the idea right or not but I feel that the most important reader right is that of empowerment. Authors should let readers draw their own conclusions and form opinions of their own to some extent. I absolutely hate reading phrases such as the following: I will now tell you the danger of using drugs; as you can see sex before marriage leads to pregnancy; or in conclusion…All of these phrases make the reader feel ignorant and even insulted. I hate when authors tell you what they are going to write about because it makes you feel as if they do not trust you to figure it out on your own. I also really liked when we talked on Wednesday about implicit assumptions. I liked how we connected C back to A. It was like a mathematical equation and so it worried me at first but thankfully English makes much more sense to me than math.