Writing Reflective Essay

For as long as I remember I never was the best at trying out different techniques for writing. I have always stuck with the same format simply because even when I was in high school, my teachers didn’t implement any new forms of writing. I never heard of discourse until now, second semester of freshman year of college. After reading Keith Grant Dave’s piece of “ Rhetorical situations and their constituents”, I discovered many ways of writing techniques I should incorporate into my work to make it a more powerful piece. In the beginning of the text it said “Writers have a stronger basis for making composing decisions and are better able as readers to understand the decisions other writers have made,” this is something I’ve never heard before,

It reads “ Asking what the discourse is about, then, involves identifying the subject matter or topic at the most obvious level, but also determining issues that underlie it and the states that should be addressed- in short, asking what questions need to be resolved by this discourse?” This ties back to my classroom due to the fact that Professor Clark-Oates speaks a lot about discourse and always reminds us to ask questions in our writing that our audience may have and respond to those questions. Types of rhetorical questions in writing make a big impact especially because someone with no knowledge may be the audience and our writing should be able to make sense to anyone who is reading. At times, I feel as if I forget that because when I’m writing I feel as if my audience already has some type of background knowledge but in most cases, that is not the case. Something important I caught was that “ Rhetors may speak in some professional capacity, a volunteer role, as a parent, or in some other role that may be less readily identifiable.” When we think of “ Rhetors” we think of professionals, we think of someone with a masters degree in writing, but it’s not always the case and that's important to keep in mind because it may always