Blog 4

For this blog, I am required to do a rhetorical analysis of the assignment sheet. I had needed some clarification of what a rhetorical analysis was. Here is the link that I found helpful “http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/725/03/”.

This assignment sheet requires the reader to understand the elements of each section. These sections include the following: purpose, description of assignment, focus, organization, development, and criteria for paper length, criteria for resources, and criteria for grade. At first, the assignment sheet may look intimidating, but after rereading it a couple times and using context clues or even a thesaurus, a reader may be able to understand exactly what is being required from their own writing.

The first section is entitled “purpose”. This section requires the writer to analyze a group or a few groups of writing in relationship to how it helps shape or influence the communication amongst individuals, practices and mission of the writing center. The purpose section of the essay requires the writer to observe the various types of cultures present at Kean University. By understanding a culture or group of people’s outlook and reasons for writing, a writing center will be able to take in to account the diversities among students and staff which may contribute to or influence the expectations of both the coach and student as well as coaching techniques and reactions to” what if scenarios” .

The “description of the assignment” provides the writer with a set of directions which is broken down in paragraph form and bullet form. More importantly, the description of the assignment assures the reader the paper is to be written in for an academic audience. The bullet points provide clarifications as to what the writer should focus on. The first bullet point deals with the identities of students, faculty and administrators. Although it seems relatively easy to talk about the identities of the students and faculty, it may seem a bit more challenging to generalize the identities of administrators. Besides acquiring demographic information and searching the Kean Website and possibly researching administrator backgrounds on Google.com,Bing.com and Yahoo.com, a student can talk to his or her professors and ask for opinions or suggestions as to what they know about administration and where they can find more information about the identities of the administration.

The rest of the “description of the assignment section” is broken down into sections dealing with institution values, assumptions and relationship between Kean’s writing culture and other writing cultures associated with other institutions and groups of writers. In theory, this may mean that the assignment requires the writer to observe or analyze different groups of writers such as ESL writers, Freshman students, returning adult students, and possibly students grouped according to major. In addition, the section wants the writer to talk about institution values and assumptions; in all honesty, I’m not quite sure what to make of that section. I think that it may be important to look at course websites and various syllabi. This will provide the writer with an understanding of what professor’s value. The challenging part of this section for me, would be to connect my understandings of institution values to the various writing cultures associated with Kean and other institutions.

I’m not sure how long this blog should be, I think this blog is a work in progress. I could continue to analyze the assignment sheet but that would create a much longer blog. If necessary, after today’s discussion I will continue to add to this.