Improving Persuasion-Mariel Stanish

When I hear the word “rhetoric”, I think of a question without an answer, but when reading Envision Chapter 1, it came across as how to make the reader think what you are thinking or persuading them. Now, I notice how a lot of news articles and magazine articles use rhetoric writing because they are trying to persuade us to believe what they believe or to think we need this type of product. It’s genius, really. The most common type of rhetoric writing I see is the visual rhetoric. You see it in newspapers all the time from ads to political cartoons. This made me come to the conclusion that everyone has different opinions and sees things differently, which means everyone has a different visual literacy. Some people notice things that others may not even think of. I also think it’s interesting that if an author knows who his audience is, he can change his writing to make it sound appealing to that audience. It must be extremely difficult to make your writing appeal to an audience with all types of opinions. An author has to be careful to not offend anyone and lose his or her audience, while still trying to persuade the audience. I also think that, as an audience, sometimes we can be lazy and just read the text, just to say we read it. College students, I believe, are one of the biggest culprits of this because we may read the text of a college book because we were told to, but no one really absorbs it. I know it’s hard for me to absorb it because I’m not really analyzing it. That’s why I find that it is easier to absorb it all by taking notes. This really helps me understand the text. There are also strategies that can help me make my writing be more persuasive by developing a thesis statement. In high school, one of my biggest struggles with writing was coming up with a great thesis statement. A thesis statement is the first sentence an audience reads, and it is the sentence that is supposed to grab the audience. I cannot wait to try these suggestions and improve my writing.