A great text can be very influential. It can motivate a person to climb on mountains” or “jump from a roof top”. The write a great text it is an art and require a lot of practice. Even thought professional writing is a matter of time, any person can write pretty good text if can follow several steps.

Step one. Everything started with idea. To find an idea seems easy, however if an idea can not come naturally, it can take some time and a lot of brainstorming. The best way to find idea is simply take a pice of a paper and  start to write everything you know about the subject. After that you will come up with several direction you would like to explore more. Pick one and this will be your idea. After that start to explore the idea. The cluster system can be used. Write separate words or sentences in connection the chosen idea (it can be something you already know about the subject or something you want to explore). Then, cluster the words and sentences you wrote by logical connection. Everything what was likened will become a body paragraphs and will logically develop your idea thought the text. Come up with a good develop idea is important, as well as the next step.

In the second step you need to consider Rhetorical situation. Rhetorical situation is a combination of an audience, author purpose and his stance. Any text has an audience. Even if it is a personal diary it is still has an audience – the author. It is extremely important to identify your audience. If you do not know exactly who those people, try to picture it, or get some information online.  You also need to consider what kind of background about the subject you are going to write about has your audience. Finally, you need clearly understand the purpose you pursuit and your position in the issue. Purpose can be to inform or pursuit or any other and position can be neutral, negative or positive. In order to influence to your audience you need to find an appropriate genre or composition of genres.

There are a lot of genres exist, the main purposes of which to shape the text in order to influence a target audience. For example you can use a research essay if you want to convince people who far away form science about safety of a new technology. Or if your audience are vica verse a professors or science, for him probably the most convincing will be to read a report genre paper with suitable to the genre sentence’s construction and terminology. Or you can use composition of genres if it serves more effectively for your purpose and audience. For example, you can use a photo essay, that combines pictures and text which reflect your idea. The other thing that can  be consider when you write a paper is appealing to logos, pathos and ethos. he Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was a master of appealing to logic (logos), emotions(pathos ) and  ethics, credibility (ethos) is a great example how those three things can be effective in the text or speech. To make sure that you get enough credibility, be careful and thoroughly with the sources you use when search for information and know how to correct cite it.

Third step, you simply need to write. You already should have all necessary information, understand the rhetorical situation and choose the genre. Use appropriate words and sentence structure start to write. If you are not so fluent in language as me, write one paragraph and take a rest. Sometimes ideas flowing and you want to write but in my experience it is better to take a little break before grammatical issue will not eat your brain together with the idea. If you scare to forget something, do not be, rather make a quick notes, where you can use a native language. Leave your first draft for a day or two and then come back and check, maybe you will want to change something or add something. Finally check your grammatical mistakes.

Writing is a great way to express yourself and be understood by many people. However, a person should know how the writing works, otherwise the text will not be effective and will not serve to the purpose it was created.

 

 

Reflection essay

I came to America four years ago without ability to write and barely understood when people talked. My reading skills was very low as well. Slowly, I have been improving my English. Entered in the collage I had problems to write. The writing center, which is a part of the collage is great place where a nice people helps with writing papers. My exploration of the center starts with the course of English composition. In the course so far, we were asked to write two long essays. It was a challenge for me because I have never written more than two pages in the foreign language. Exploration of the writing center along with working on my homework helped me improve my language. I have learnt a lot of new word and some sentence constrictions as well as numerous grammatical mistakes. Everytime when I come after writing center it takes me about two hours to fix my mistakes and learn more about the language. However, writing grammatically correct, does not mean write effectively, that is what I have learnt from the course of Freshman composition.

The course of Freshman composition is necessary for everybody. It is not just English rather different styles of  the language – genres. Without knowledge of the genres it is hard to write. Or if to be more precise it is hard to write effectively. Genre defines everything, the audience, the tone of the actual text, the context and so on.  One of our assignment was to write a rhetorical essay. During work on the paper I realized that every author has a purpose, he writes a certain message in order to have a certain influence and respond from a target audience. I understood that audience cannot be just everybody even if the topic is universal, like in my case, when I was writing about procrastination. Considering the audience’s background and publishing source it is possible to understand who indeed the audience can be and write an influential paper.

In the next assignment I was asked to write was a research essay. This was a great experience since I continued to investigate the topic of procrastination in dept. It was influential because in my personal life it helped me to be more productive. I got experience of reading a lot of research paper and It seems that started to understand better how scientific language works. The language in the reports is boring and full of terminology. In the assignment I got a chance to work on my ability to bring the dry language of the reports, in particular the key points of the studies and results, to the audience without scientific background.

One more important thing I have learnt during the course of Freshman composition – how to find good sources. By good sources I mean credibility of the source. Usually, I got use to find information in internet and since the information was found from whatever source I was satisfied. After the course I finally started to pay attention from where the information comes from and if I can rely on it. One of the conditions to get a good grade was to use reliable sources from library. I have leant the whole bunch of interesting things on the library web-site, such as how to find a great articles or study, that almost any book available even if the City collage does not have it, that there some interesting place I can visit for free or that I can read New York times for free! Finally, I understood the taste of a good article such as those in New York Times newspaper. Of course I had heard about the newspaper and had known that it should be a very good but when I just came I barely understood the language and the newspaper was so boring for me. Several years after, when my language has improved, I realized how beautiful, interesting and informative those articles are.

In the last three months I have learnt a lot of things which are fundamental for my future success in the collage, for my career as well as just my well-being in this country. Now, when I start to write a paper I analyze the audience and style, as well as I think about an effect I want to have on my audience. I started to think about what a context or a rhetorical situation is. Now, if I am going to write something, I want to make sure that the information that I will be shearing comes from reliable sources. Now, I know where and how to get this information and how effectively introduce the topic to a different audience. And of course, I was writing a lot that helped me to work on my grammatical, contextual and syntactic mistakes. The three months of the course turned to be a very productive and influential.

The case of Mondays  

Rhetorical analysis of the topic of procrastination through four sources.

It’s a nice day and so many things to do! Why just not to forget about everything and enjoy live? Often people find themselves in this situation. While sometimes delaying things needed to be done will not hurt, for example don not go food shopping today; the other can lead to failure in life in long term, like if someone postpone to do homework can lead to bad grade and potentially destroy career path. Procrastination is a condition when a person tends to postpone important and urgent things all the time that lead to problems in life and negative phycological behavior.

General audience have negative opinion about procrastination, however, the topic of procrastination raises many discussions. Some authors go more in nuances of the topic and discover positive sides of the phenomena, while others support the public opinion. To be persuasive in texts they appeal to pathos, logos and ethos.

In twitter Daksh Desai @sunnydesai6 a nature and travel photographer/videographer from India tweeted a post “My Procrastination level” where he told people how he reached the bottom point of procrastination for the “20-25 days”. The author is free soul and how the majority of creative people incline to procrastinate. He probably made this post in twitter to call himself to action and he expects some advice from people. By posting this message to the audience he tries to inform it about his terrible situation. The audience is the followers of Daksh: his friends, people different occupations including photographers and videographers as well as random people, occasionally find the article. Usually people share a kind of routine with people who they already know, from this perspective Twitter as a source of message and specific genre is a perfect choice. Through simple, colloquial language as well as quick twitter access the message was effectively transferred right to desirable people’s eyes and inside their minds. The post is a good example of overall people’s negative opinion about procrastination which the author shared and supported.

  The Author supporting his negative attitude to procrastination by appealing to pathos. He  draw a picture of himself as a guy who lost his shape:

“I wanted to play a game and the first thought that came to me was; “I will have to lift the display (hinges) – boot it up and then I felt oh boy! It’s a lot of stuff, let it be let me just sleep”(Desai, 2018).

The author expressed his feeling of anxiety and sense of danger by comparing it to “When a snake bites you and the pace at which poison spreads”. (Desai, 2018) The choice of words as well appeal to the audience’s emotions “let me tell you a RIDICULOUS things”, “anxiety has already KICKED IN BUT”, “I have become like a SLOTH” and etc (Desai, 2018). The feelings that the author tried to raise in audience hearts appealing to pathos helps him to make people a part of his “terrible” situation.

In addition, the author made a little bit effort to convince people about negative procrastination side by address to logos. He said that in 20-25 days no one book was read, he also wrote that his routine was “wake-up-eat-watch something on YouTube/A Series – playing games – sleep”. The logic part of brain will analyze the facts and defiantly tell that the author need help, procrastination will “kill” him.

    Using logos and pathos in the message, the author did not appeal to ethos. However, choosing a right genre to inform his audience, the author will support a common negative belief about procrastination but will not switch it to a different, deeper level of concern.

In the report made by Wasche K. A and his colleagues  about procrastination and self-efficacy: “Tracing vicious and virtuous circles in self-regulated learning” an experiment was conducted in which the authors have confirmed their hypothesis about “virtues circles of procrastination” and “virtues circles of self-efficiency”(Waschle. 2012). In other words, a postponement leads to another postponements and is a cause of unbelieving in success and failure in life and in contrary, with the same mechanism, self-efficiency leads to success in life.

The authors are scientists who had a purpose to convince by showing their audience a long term effect of procrastination. The audience are the people who are interested in educational sciences or any others with strong educational background and ability to understand a specific terminology and dry language with of the scholarly genre – report. The audience in most of cases take in consideration only facts and statistic that makes the scholarly genre ideal to serve the authors purpose to convince.

To build credibility the authors all the time operated to logos. Followed by report style they used statistic analysis and the others scientific methods descriptions and conclusions.

“Thus, students who tended to procrastinate, subsequently experienced less achievement of their learning goals, and this lower goal achievement reinforced their inclination to further procrastinate the study tasks”(Waschle, 2012).

The authors did not appeal to pathos, however appealed to ethos, where they cited conclusions of related study.

“For example, Wolters (2003) found that a general work avoidance orientation, that is, the tendency to minimize the effort one must provide for academic tasks, predicted procrastination in addition to self-efficacy” (Waschle, 2012).

Overall, the scholars genre which authors used effectively convincing the “demanded” audience. However, the next article does not look that persuasive. 

The article published in the magazine Deliberate, Kyle Homer compared “the good” and “the bad” of procrastination. At the end he came to conclusion that “it is better to plane the goal we want to accomplish”. (Homer, no date) The author’s went deep in nuances of procrastination and had a purpose to inform people about them. In this article Homer broke down belief about procrastination as a negative phenomena in society and showed “small glimmer of positivity from our waste of time” (Homer, no date). The audience of the magazine is young people who probably believe in faith and Christianity. However, the article is under one of the section called “Book and culture” that can limit audience by people with specific interest in the topics.  The magazine genre will work the best for the particular audience since magazines implies lots of colorful pictures and glam paper that attracts young people. In addition, the language and the structure of the text is simple that help to deliver information to the youth effectively. The author, by building awareness of a positive sides of procrastination and switched mood of the audience from negative to negative with positive nuances, appeal to pathos.

“Procrastination is viewed as the worst trait of all traits, however many of us never talk about the potential positives of procrastinating. As writer Don Marquis states: “Is procrastination an art form or a cultural nuisance?’(Homer, 2018). The author created a feeling about procrastination as of something scary and destroying.  The same time he raised contradiction when he mentioned about potential positives. In “the bad” part of the article the author used a comparative expression to emphasis a small positive effect of the postponement and the big consequence it rises, that makes the audience feel and maintain accustom negative judgment about the phenomena. “Avoiding large tasks is definitely a positive. However, using small tasks as a sign of success will not help us at all”; “Yes, the under pressure mantra does work from time to time. What we often forget about is that we need perfect conditions for it to work”; “Our brains are destined for survival; creativity is not”. (Homer, 2018). In the text author as well used a lot of non-neutral lexis “a false sense of accomplishment”, “the beauty of the creative process” appealing to pathos however, not much links can be seen that appeal to logos and ethos.

      The only reference the author gave that appealed to ethos “Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” (qtd. Homer, 2018) is not enough to build strong credibility.  Appealing to logos is also not strong and can be seen only as a logical conclusions. “The levels of stress drive us to finish our work when we wouldn’t have done it before.”

“Secondly, our brains are designed for surviving through any problem or concern. This is usually the last resort when we are stressed. We know we have the resources to procrastinate, so we put the task in the back of our brains.” (Homer, no date)

The author in the article focused more on appealing to pathos rather then logos and ethos. It is seems a right choice considering young audience and the magazine genre. However, the lack of strong evidence as well as the way of comparing bad with good created feelings that even though there are procs that do not worth paying that much attention. At the end the author supported this idea even more by placing the sentence “it is always best to plan the goals we want to accomplish”. One of the cons of procrastination Homer mentioned in his article was creativity, next author, Adam Grant discussed about it in more details.

       Mister Grant in his New York Times article “Why I thought myself to procrastinate” talks about the positive side of procrastinating – creativity. Adam Grant is a professor of management and psychology and he got used to do things far ahead from deadline or “pre-crastinate”. However, in this article he tried to analyses procrastination from different angles and tried to convince this audience that procrastination has a positive effect. He challenged this audience for the very begging and titled this article “Why I taught myself to procrastinate”.  The author built this argumentation on contradiction between “pre-crastionation” and procrastination using his personal experience.

  The audience is a wide range of people mostly with educational background is inclined to trust Mr. Grant since the text published in newspaper genre in such source with high reputation as New Your Times that builds seriousness and credibility in minds of the audience. Language in the genre is simple but the same time operates with terminology “pre-crastination, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc.” and non-neutral lexis.

The author effectively used pathos in this text. To influence on the educated audience appealing to their emotions that it is not easy since it inclined to rely on logic but the author’s work done well. By using the specific lexis Grant forced the audience to be in his shoes “What kind of idiot wrote this garbage?”(about himself)  or “I’ve learned — against my nature”. He also used comparison “progress is like oxygen and postponement is agony”(for him) , “Procrastination as a curse”. As well as effectively used of pathos and ethos (Grant, 2016).

Grant demonstrated numerous among of citations in the article and built by that credibility. Several years ago, he met a creative student who gave him an idea that procrastination brought out more creativity than “pre-crastination”. He was convinced in the phenomena by forcing himself to procrastinate as well as by survey, experiment and testimony from other people’s statement. “Bill Clinton has been described as a ‘chronic procrastinator” who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.” (Grant, 2016.) He does this by building creditability referencing other experts in the field. For example, he quoted psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik who almost a 100 years ago stated that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks than for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away.” (Grant, 2016)

As was mentioned before Grand describes series of experiments and studies appeal to logic. “Over 80 percent of college students are plagued by procrastination, requiring epic all-nighters to finish papers and prepare for tests. Roughly 20 percent of adult’s report being chronic procrastinators” (Grant, 2016). Or this own experience “What I discovered was that in every creative project, there are moments that require thinking more laterally and, yes, more slowly” (Grant, 2016).

In particular he claims that procrastination “it’s a virtue for creativity” (Grant, 2016). He wrote that he has a condition called “pre-crastination” which means “urge to start a task immediately and finish it as soon as possible” (Grant, 2016). However, Grant also claims that a person cannot procrastinate doing for too long. By doing this you risk to lose creative because of lack of time. 

Building rhetorical situation based on credibility to author and his profession background as well as a newspaper genre he used, Grand has reached this purpose. He has shifted common negative believe about procrastination to significant plus of the phenomena comparatively to Homer, who’s proses does not seems matter that much.  Even though Grant believes that procrastination is not a good idea as long as you wait to the last minute (at the end of the article he even gave steps how a person can make a deal with procrastination) he effectively persuaded the audience to pay attention on such as nuance as creativity.

In conclusion, all four authors used a topic of procrastination to pursuit their purposes: Dakshi tired to inform people while Waste and his colleagues had purpose to even deeply convince people in negativity of procrastination and by that support common belief about it. While Homer and Grant turn procrastination to as not that evil as people think with purpose inform (Homer) and convince (Grant) in it. All four authors used appropriate genres to reach their audiences effectively. However, authors Grant and Waste with his colleagues influence more on shifting people opinions than Dakshi and Homer by effectively using rhetorical situation as well as logos, pathos and ethos. Whatever the message and the purpose is, it is very important to elevate rhetorical situation and make a series of right choice to make sure that the message will give desirable effect. 

Bibliography

Daksh, D. 2018. Procrastination. Twitter. Accessed September, 27,

2018. https://twitter.com/sunnydesai6/status/10453678407595..

Grant, A. 2016. Why I thought myself to procrastinate. New York Times. Accessed September, 27, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-i-taught-myself-to-procrastinate.html

Homer, K. No date. The pros and cons of Procrastination. Deliberate magazine. Accessed September, 27, 2018. http://www.deliberatemagazine.com/pros-cons-procrastination/

Wasche,K., Allgäuer, A., Lechner, A., Fink, S., Nuckles, M. 2013. Procrastination and self-efficacy: Tracing vicious and virtuous circles in self-regulate learning. Sciencedirect. Accessed September, 17, 2018. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959475213000662 

This web-site is a result of taking an English composition class and a personal improvement.The journey started with a personal problem of lacking time and energy to be if not and excellent but at least a student. The problem was turned into procrastination perspective. Though working on rhetorical essay procrastination appeared to be a great problem with not a great effect on peoples life. In further development thought research essay the ways of interventions were found and personally practiced. Simple and probably known by everybody methods made a great improvement in my life. The improvements have happened unexpectedly, since i had never thought that little things like a sleep pattern are so powerfull. I was so impressed by it that had a desire to show everybody who has the same situation as me (full time student and mom of two kids) that a lack of time and energy can not be a such big problem if you know how to deal with it. Thought next task “composition in two genres” was created a children book that demonstrated methods of interventions as well as an everyday problems of a mother and student. There is every time choice between reality and dream but sometimes you do not need to choose, you just need to work on your procrastination.