Hey Ari,

Writing has always been a challenge for us. You tend to focus on every single sentence being a masterpiece that you lose sight of the big idea, and then you end up with essays composed of decent paragraphs that don’t make sense together. It also takes up a lot of time this way. You’d end up spending hours just to finish one essay. It’s just not efficient. College will change all that. A lot of stress, anxiety, and work will eventually come to you, but from this you’ll learn how to write more efficiently than you ever could. You’ll learn a lot from your freshman writing class, like how to use rhetoric to strengthen your arguments and write an overall better essay. Your essays will get better overtime, and you’ll realize that your writing style has progressed in ways that you never thought could be done in high school. From this, you’ll be able to come up with your own theory of writing.

Right now, you’re probably wondering what your theory of writing is, or what a theory of writing even is. You’ve been writing essays your whole life, but you never really thought about how you approach your writings. Don’t worry, it will all make sense as the semester goes by. You seem to be confused about all these terms our professor just discussed about in class. What’s a rhetorical situation? What does rhetorical elements have to do with my essay? Well, all those terms will make sense after your first essay, the source-based essay.

At first, it might seem like this essay is an easy one. All you have to do is find some articles about gun control and basically summarize it. However, you’ll soon learn that your source-based essay is one of the most challenging essays that you will ever write. Summarizing an article might be easy, we’ve done it countless times, but the way in which we analyze each text is something that you’ve never encountered before. Your first essay requires you to take each source and analyze it for its rhetoric. An understanding of each term is key to writing this essay. The terms discussed previously not only play a huge role in this essay, but for all your writings that you will make this semester.

As of right now, you’ve only approached your essays with one method. Middle school and high school taught you that essays are best written in one format, the basic five paragraph essay with an introduction, conclusion, and three body paragraphs supporting whatever claim you had. As the semester progresses however, you’ll realize that sometimes this isn’t the best way to write compositions. This is where your lessons about genre, audience, purpose, stance, and the rhetorical situation come into play. The traditional five paragraph essay would be the genre in which you originally wrote your essay, but if you really want your writing piece to effectively send your message to the reader, these other key rhetorical terms must be considered as well.

Although all the rhetorical elements should be considered when writing any essay, you should consider your genre and audience the most. Your writing pieces will require you to choose one current social issue and write about it for most of your essays this semester. You’re going to end up choosing gun control, it’s something you’ve wanted to learn more about and by the end of the semester, you’ll see this issue in a whole new perspective. Your second essay will make you further research the gun control issue in America and ask questions about this topic that you would have never thought about. This is where the purpose plays a big role, as your essay will take on the general shape and contours of a model essay. Choosing your model essay will be challenging. First, it’s important to figure out the purpose of your essay. Do you want to inform the reader about your topic, or are you trying to convince them to agree with your stance? Finding your purpose makes it easier to choose a model essay, because you want the model essay to have the same purpose as your essay.

At this point in the semester, you’ll now have developed your own theory of writing. However, your theory will continue to change as you write more essays. Your third essay is where you’ll realize that audience and genre are the most important elements in your writing pieces. If you don’t fully understand the audience you want to reach or the genre, the message that you want to send may not be as effective. As a young American, it’s easier for you to reach an audience in this demographic. You can relate to your audience, and you know what kind of language to use to keep them interested in your topic. A better understanding of your audience helps you choose genres that will appeal to this audience the most. For example, for your third essay, you will have to make compositions in two different genres. Choosing genres will be easy for you, you already know what genres reach your audience the most and which genres interest them.

The lessons you’ll learn from this these essays won’t only apply to your writings in this class, it can also be applied outside the classroom. The key rhetorical terms can be applied and analyzed in any type of writing or text. You’ll soon find out that sociology class is the class with the most work. You’ll be having an essay due every week, on top of other assignments such as the midterm or the final exam. Your traditional writing style won’t work, but by applying the rhetorical elements into your essays, you can write faster while still keeping in mind the main purpose of your essay. Don’t worry, by the end of the semester you’ll be able to write amazing essays in any genre that you can think of. As long as you stay aware of the key rhetorical elements as you write, your essays will always be successful in delivering your message.