Rhetorical Knowledge

John Cameron O’Brien

Professor Lynn Raymond

UWRT 1104-002

1/18/2019
 As defined in the syllabus, Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to identify and apply

strategies across a range of texts and writing situations. Using their own writing processes and

approaches, writers compose with intention, understanding how genre, audience, purpose, and

context impact writing choices.

I know that I have used Rhetorical Knowledge in my writing portion of the genealogy

project. The genealogy project required me to write about my family history and I had to

understand who my audience was so that I could write my paper accordingly. I know that my

audience had no clue about the background of my family and who anyone was in my family, so I

had to be very descriptive when talking about my family. The reason for this is because I needed

the audience to understand things about my family that they did not know about to begin with.

I also know that I have used Rhetorical Knowledge in my daily writings. The purpose of

the daily writings is to get the brain into the mode of writing each day that we enter the

classroom. The purpose is important because this is not something that usually needed to be very

descriptive, it was more so a thing that just wanted your thoughts to be thrown down on a piece

of paper and that we would be able to share these thoughts with our classmates.

Genre is also something that has had a huge impact on the way that I use Rhetorical

Knowledge in my writings for this class. Writing something like the genealogy paper will require

a completely different type of writing than something like the recipe that I wrote for one of my

studios. When writing my genealogy paper, I needed to be very descriptive and go into detail

about my family and the background of my family. This required lots of research and caused me

to cite lots of sources. When writing the recipe for one of my studios, this required me to put

together a step by step process to follow to get an outcome. I needed to make sure that the

writing was clear and concise so that the audience would be able to follow along with what I was
telling them to do. With these two examples, you can see how genre plays a huge factor into how

you go about writing something and causes you to look at how you should portray the piece of

writing that will be the most beneficial to the audience.

You can see how I have used Rhetorical Knowledge with my different writing pieces

over the course of the semester. I had to use many different aspects of Rhetorical Knowledge to

get my writings across in a way that would make sense to the audience, serve its purpose, and be

in the correct genre. Rhetorical Knowledge is something that we use everyday in our writing

practices and sometimes we don’t even realize.