Eureka magazine

EUREKA

JUNE 2017

Learn to write EFFECTIVELY Empathy &

WRITING

Raising Star READERS

WHAT IS THE RHETORICAL SITUATION? REDEFINING MY STYLE A Developing Theory of Writing

WRITING

REDEFINING MY STYLE A Developing Theory of Writing

By Alejandra Hobi

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

When we are asked to write something, sometimes is really hard get started and thinking about it can cause migraine.

This article shows some tips that can be helpful if you need to turn a project in.

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riting has always been important to me. I remember that when I was a girl I fantasized about writing a novel about my life. Years later, I started studying Journalism and I enjoyed every time we have to turn a writing piece in. I finished my bachelor’s degree and one of the jobs I had was in a newspaper, where I really didn’t have a lot of opportunities of doing some creative writing. I was translating news from English to Spanish. All I had to do was following the recipe to write news: answering to the Ws (what, who, where, when and why?) and H (how?) questions in the first paragraph and adding some details in the next two. That was really easy and became automatic after a while.

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MY FIRST EXPERIENCES

couple of years later, I got what would be my last job in Mexico before moving here and was then when I faced one of my biggest challenges: I was hired by a women’s clinic, which also sells nutritional supplements, to write a biographic book of the owner of the business, a well-known chemist.

This woman is (or was) some kind of celebrity in Mexico and she dreamt about having her own book (or more than one) like many of her idols, such as Oprah Winfrey and Suzanne Sommers.

Unfortunately, that never happened because she was always busy and never had time to work on the book. However, she also had to send some articles to a women’s magazine with national

WRITING coverage and she never had time to write either.

That was how I got my biggest opportunity to write.

The first day I started working with her she asked me to write an article about Pantothenic Acid, also known as Vitamin B5. I didn’t have any idea about what she was talking about. I was a journalist, but she was asking me to write about chemistry. I had to figure it out what to do. I needed to write about something totally scientific, but making it really simple and appealing to women in her forties or fifties. They were my real target market. I was about 28 back then, I was single and didn’t have kids. I didn´t know too much about the situations that these women could be facing, like menopause or other hormonal changes. I had to learn a lot, like when an actor have to get ready to play a character.

me, “everybody thinks that I write these articles, but we both know that this work is 50/50.”

Situations like the lack of recognition along with other opportunities lead to the prospect of moving to the United States. In that moment I knew that coming here would mean to renounce to everything I had in Mexico, especially my family and friends, and my profession along with my work experience. I moved here at the end of 2010 with the idea of master my English writing, “using” my then fiancé (aka my husband now) as my teacher. He was giving me different topics and I had to write. He enjoyed the idea at the beginning, but he got bored really fast, we got married, had kids and I got stuck in some kind of writing limbo.

Since then, my writing became limited to my long cathartic postings on Facebook, both in English and Spanish, when I was facing a hard situation.

Those monthly articles had two important goals: first of all, she wanted to keep alive her image, and second, they wanted to increase the appointments in the clinic and the sales of the supplements. Month after month I was getting more comfortable with the process. I was learning the topic to work on, my boss gave me a lots of books and I just wrote and wrote. I showed the final article to my boss and she either approved or disapproved it. The articles got a wonderful response and we were having more people coming to the clinic and buying a lot of supplements. I became some kind of expert on those topics, but the only name shown in the article was hers. One day, she came to me showing a creepy smile and told

Last year, we had many economic problems and one of the options I was offered to take was going back to school. The idea sounded fantastic to me. I always enjoyed studying and that could give me some credentials in this country.

I got stuck in some kind of writing limbo.

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GOING BACK TO SCHOOL

came back to school having a lot of expectations, but my situation is so different now. I am back after almost two decades and am taking classes in a language that is not my maternal language. One of the classes that I took last quarter was English 174, which worked as a nice warming up before studying 101. My instructor was nice and funny and I think that empathy helped a lot to not be scared of writing in a language that is not mine.

One of my first challenges was writing an essay about identity. I got happy with the result and I received good comments from him. That made me feel really excited and motivated. Finally, I was doing something meaningful again. For years, I was feeling kind of neglected by working moms who give you a strange look when you mention that you are “just a housewife”. But now I feel like a writer again and that has increased my stamina for the last two quarters.

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(where), context (where and when), purpose and uring this second quarter, I started exigence (why), audience (who), design, genre and studying English 101 and during my medium and process (how). Then, I realized that first class, my instructor started reading I couldn’t find a concept that I could match with the prologue of the book Everyone’s an “what?” There is obviously an element designed Author, that basically states that due to technology, to what is being said, but hasn’t been named. we are writing more than before, using the social The same thinking about the rhetorical networks as examples. Then, we started looking to what would be the emblematic concept of this class: situation made me remember those days where I the “rhetorical situation”. When I heard that term, had to write articles directed to women in their I went back in time to my Greek-Latin Etymologies forties and fifties and everything made sense. class in high school and I remembered something In that moment, I was directing my discourse about orators and speeches in the antique Greece, to them, using my persuasion to sell them the but this concept looked more complex here and “need” of buying these supplements or making included some factors: stance, purpose, audience, an appointment. Those that I saw only as my context, exigence, genre, medium and process. target market were my audience and I learned The idea is analyzing each situation to adapt to understand them and their expectations using what we are saying, using the “art of persuasion” books and my experience working there. When or rhetoric. I immediately remembered my I learned about the rhetorical situation, my brain Journalism classes and how I needed to write my brought back the experience of writing for the news, and I compared the rhetorical situation to magazine and I labeled all the parts of the process. the answering of the Ws and H questions: stance This is how I can represent the rhetorical situation:

THE RHETORICAL SITUATION

This is how I perceive the Rhetorical Situation thinking of my times when I was writing articles for a women’s magazine down in Mexico. My visual shows all the elements matched with the Ws and H questions.

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WRITING realized something interesting about the rhetorical situation, that some of these factors can change with time. The stance or the context can be different, the audience can be different too. As a consequence, the rhetorical situation would not be the same. If I tried to write an article for the same magazine right now, my stance is totally different now. I am married and I have children. The audience is not the same either.

Their taste may have changed. Then, after figuring out how the rhetorical situation worked, I was ready to start my first writing project.

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A TOUCH OF ART

or our first writing, we visited the Lightcatcher Museum and enjoyed two exhibits, “Images of Resilience: Chicana/o Art and Its Mexican Roots”, which showed some colorful pieces influenced by the Mexican folklore, and “The Katrina Decade: Images of an Altered City”, that presented photographs of New Orleans on the 10th Anniversary of the Katrina Hurricane. Both exhibits were different, but interesting. It is not hard to guess the reason because I felt more attached to the one that reminds me home. For this project, we were asked to create a Prezi and curate our own virtual exhibit. I chose the topic of death, seen from different points of view (like violence shown in some pieces or the celebration of Día de los Muertos). Working with Prezi for the first time was challenging, but enjoyable, and I think that my project turned out better than expected.

At the same time, I had to write the analytical essay and describe the elements of the rhetorical situation. It was hard to differentiate some of these parts because sometimes they can be confusing or sound repetitive, especially exigence and context.

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I always try to step in someone else’s shoes.

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1. Stance: A journalist/writer with no experience about being a mom, wife or being 40 or 50.

2. Purpose: Keeping a positive image of my boss, bringing more people to the clinic and selling more supplements.

3. Audience: Women in their 40s and 50s who buy this Women’s magazine.

4. Context: The service that the clinic offers is directed to upper-class women, who spend a lot of money trying to stop the aging process. The clinic is located in one of the most luxurious areas in Mexico City and they received celebrities, politicians and medals-winners athletes.

5. Exigence: I was paid for being a writer for the business.

6. Genre: A really informal Women’s magazine article.

7. Medium: The article was printed in aWomen’s magazine with national coverage, but I was just sending it as a Word document.

8. Design: I wasn’t in charge of the design. That was something that the publisher did, along with the editing.

9. Process: The process started with learning the topic, doing some research, write, show it to my former boss, correct it and send it to the publisher, where they were in charge of editing and designing the pages. Sometimes I sent the images they should include, especially the ones related to the supplements the clinic was selling.

10. But, again, where is the “what” in the rhetorical situation? If the secret formula suggested by my instructor Sherri Winans is SPACE + GM/D + P, where each letter represents the initials of the elements of the rhetorical situation, we could add a S to SPACE to have it to be SPACES, where S is the initial for Subject (what).

Even when I didn’t know the name of all these parts, when I had to write about a topic that I wasn’t familiar with, I looked for answers on books or internet, but the most important piece during my writing process is that I always try to be empathetic. I always “try to step in someone’s else shoes”. I won’t be able to know what everybody wants, likes or expects, but I do my best guessing and imagine “what can get their attention?”

After all these internal thoughts about empathy, I

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WRITING The concept of exigence is barely mentioned in the book and we were asked to interpret it as timeliness: Why is important to write about this right now?

What is the need of talking about this topic?

While writing, I also recalled that my most hated part is working on the citations, especially when I had to deal with something new like the MLA style and there are way too many rules, and they are always changing. In Mexico, I taught a class similar to this one where I had to teach my students to use in-text citations. I think that when I was teaching ten years ago, and especially when I studied college 20 years ago, everything was easier because we didn’t have too many sources and rules like now. Thinking back to the college days, we only had books, newspapers and sometimes magazines.

Internet was kind of new and no teacher asked you to include cybernetic sources. Having a computer was still considered a luxury.

and spend the whole afternoon “navigating” through real books. I felt sympathy for Carr when he mentioned that for him it is hard to be focused now. For some reason, I feel that my learning style has changed a lot from my previous experience in college to this one. Sometimes it is difficult to stay focused and everything becomes a distraction. The same day, we read the article “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” by Katherine Hayles. She talks about deep attention versus hyper attention related to the old and new generations, understanding that new generations are having more problems staying focused and they need to find something that they found interesting.

I recalled my days at school when I could get lost reading a book and didn’t matter how noisy everything was. I just took a 500-page book and I finished it in a couple of days. Now, even when I am a X-Gen, I know that my concentration is not what used to be and sometimes when the topic is not appealing to me takes a while to get engaged, now I take notes to really understand what I am reading and I also know that I could never read from a screen. I still need the hardcopy of the document.

One of the surprising ideas I discovered was when we watched some Maryanne Wolf videos. In the interview named “Reading is not natural”, she states that we are not born to read, Photo courtesy of Pixabay that reading is a new circuit that is formed with My most hated part of the writing process is working other elements that are there for other reasons. on the citations, because there are many rules and She also recommends to read to our children to they are always changing. help creating this new circuit. fter turning in the first project, we had to continue with the second one: one study about our reading. One of the first readings we had to do during the planning phase was “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. I remember those days without internet. The first time I was in college, we had to work on mechanical typewriters. We had to think twice before writing something because deleting a letter or a word was kind of tricky.

Searching information? We had to go to the library 6

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Sometimes it is difficult to stay focused and everything becomes a distraction.

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READING TO MY DAUGHTERS

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Photo courtesy of Pixabay

According to the researcher Maryanne Wolf, “we are not born to read”, but reading to our children can help them to create connections between other parts that were already there for other reasons.

Because I felt that my reading style was pretty defined and after watching Wolf videos and all the ideas she has about literacy and children, I preferred to study my daughters’ reading. They are 2 and 4-year old. I thought that observing their reading could be more beneficial, because we could see if we were doing it right and make decisions afterwards. I recorded their reading six times changing the variables to determine if they were focused during that time.

For this project I was asked to use the IMRAD format, which is the acronym for Introduction, Method, Results, Analysis and Discussion, and the APA style that is more formal than MLA and looks more academic. I mentioned to my instructor that I feel that these styles limit the creativity of the students. I understand that we have to give credit to the sources, but I feel like asking to leave a cover page or using Times New Roman is not that important and can affect the process of creativity

instead. I also think that sometimes the rules are contradictory or confusing between sources, even talking about the same style.

Before turning the second project in, I worked on other one using APA style for my Business Math class: an analysis of the financial results of Walt Disney during the last five years.

The purpose of that paper was convincing to my instructor that was a good idea to buy stocks in this company based on those numbers.

I didn’t like that project too much because I felt that became really wordy and full of numbers without saying something new, that was more about describing some tables and charts that were already there, but my instructor seemed to like it. I have to say that I did my best trying to make it less boring than actually sounds, but I still feel that it is not contributing with something to the financial world.

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WRITING Observing my children’s reading was really interesting, and I could see that my 4-year old daughter got bored after a couple of times of listening to the same book. The text wasn’t challenging anymore and she got distracted with something else, while the 2-year old seemed more interested because she was recognizing more words and images every time she listened to the book.

My conclusion for this project was that my husband and I have to keep working on something that can make reading more interesting for them, such as finding or making some props or using changes on the voice tone. My daughters are obviously really young, but if the trend to the hyper attention persists, it can be harder to keep them focused for a long time.

I struggled more writing this paper than the other two because I tried to keep a formal style using the passive voice, but I think that wasn’t me.

I was told that I could use “I” instead of pretending to be a third party and I felt the difference right away, my writing was just flowing. I always have tried to make my writing simple that can be easy to understand by other people, especially when I am writing on my second language.

Photo courtesy of Freepik

I don’t like when I try to make my style more formal. I feel that sounds forced... like it is not me who is writing.

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DEFINING MY THEORY OF WRITING

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inally, for our third writing project, we had to work on our theory of writing. When I heard that term, I went back to my Science class and I recalled that a theory was

ENGLISH 101

something that follows a hypothesis, but doesn’t have to be proved, and when that happens, becomes a law. Then, my understanding was that I have to create my own style based on the ideas that I got out the class.

If I have to choose the concepts that will get stuck in my head, I will definitely talk about the rhetorical situation and the change to hyper attention. As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, I like the idea of being “flexible rhetors”, as mentioned in the professor Jeffrey Klausman’s Prezi, and that we can adapt what we say to the different rhetorical situations, paying special attention to their elements. The words and the style we use cannot be the same, we have to adapt what we say and use our persuasion to reach our goal and be effective.

I tried to make a diagram about what I think that should be the ideal process of writing, or my theory of writing. I never had done that before, at least not consciously. I have always tried to know what is the topic and who is going to read me. Then, I seat in front of the laptop and I type inspired by muses until I can’t write anymore, then I go back and “clean” my text. This has always worked for me, it is like feeling adrenaline running through my veins. However, I like to follow processes and guidelines because I think that working in a more methodic way can be more effective and gives you a better control.

My diagram starts with the TOPIC, and then ask the writer if he knows his/her STANCE, PURPOSE, AUDIENCE, CONTEXT and EXIGENCE. If the writer knows all these elements applied to the rhetorical situation, the next step is determine if one MEDIUM, GENRE or DESIGN was assigned. If no, we can think what would be the most effective to reach our PURPOSE; if yes, we need to learn what are the guidelines to follow.

We can work now on the PROCESS of writing and designing, turn in our first draft, get feedback and (maybe some face-to-face feedback), revise our paper to finally “deliver” our final version of the project. On the next page, you can see my approach to my Theory of Writing.

WRITING MY THEORY OF WRITING (The Ideal Process) WHAT? What is my SUBJECT? PLANNING

BRAINSTORMING

How much do I know about the topic?

What is my STANCE?

Who is my AUDIENCE? How much they know and/or care about the topic?

What is my PURPOSE? Why is this important?

What is my EXIGENCE?

What is the CONTEXT for this topic?

WHERE?

WHO?

WHY?

WHERE AND WHEN?

HOW? Which MEDIUM, GENRE and DESIGN can be more effective to reach my purpose?

No

Do I have a MEDIA and/or GENRE assigned? HOW? Yes Work on the PROCESS HOW? WRITING CREATIVITY PROOFREADING DESIGN

First Draft FEEDBACK REVISION PROOFREADING Final Version

According to me, this should be the ideal process of writing, or my theory of writing. Everything should start with planning and brainstorming, identifying all the elements of the rhetorical situation, and finishing with the final version of the writing piece.

Something that was really different during this class, and that I really appreciated, is that we were allowed to express our ideas, that we could break the rules sometimes if there was a good reason. I also think that is so important that English teachers can spend time reading the projects and giving feedback to the students, like my instructor did. As it was mentioned in the video “Shaped by Writing”, the students feel important when someone is actually reading what they write, when they can see that the instructor is taking the time to read and give feedback to them. I remember many times when I have gotten some papers back just with a checkmark and no

comments, that makes you wonder if the teacher actually read your project.

I also like the collaborative work we did during the quarter. I think that Canvas is a wonderful tool, and that the discussions there will be remember by many classmates. I have noticed that many classmates are writing more now at the end of the quarter. The feedback that we shared during these ten weeks have made our projects more interesting and complete. My projects wouldn’t have been the same without my classmates’ comments. Sometimes, when you feel stuck with your writing, one nice comment can be the solution.

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WRITING powerful stats into art” by Chris Jordan. I would In the future, I see myself writing. I know that there like to find the way to make something that can be is a lot of things I have to work on, but I am open creative and meaningful at the same time. I think and willing to learn. I hope that I can do some Work- that the way Jordan uses his art can bring attention to Study in the Writing Center by fall and that I can be different problems we are all facing as society, such helpful and people can help me to learn too. I will as tobacco addiction or the abuse of prescription be in the Visual Communications program by next drugs. Since Jordan to Sommers, all those ideas will year, but I always have felt that both, writing and go with me. I always have ideas, but I want, and visuals, have to go together. Some of my friends need, to create something outstanding that make think that I am starting again, but I feel that I am me feel proud of it. I think that I am following the right path and I want to thank my instructors and complementing what I studied before. classmates who have helped to feel that this is not During English 101, we have also watched several it, that I can (and will) do more, like the Phoenix TED Talks and the most amazing was “Turning arising from the ashes.

DREAMING OF THE FUTURE

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

I want to be like the Phoenix arising from the ashes.

ENDNOTES

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, 2008. https://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession, 2007, http://www.jessicapressman.com/CAT_winter2013/wp-content/

uploads/2012/11/Hayles-attention.pdf Jordan, Chris. “Turning powerful stats into art”. TED: Ideas worth spreading. TED, Feb 2008, Klaufsman, Jeffrey. “The Flexible Rhetor.” (Prezi Presentation) https://prezi.com/5wx0fyiq8m2b/

the-flexible-rhetor/ Lunsford, Andrea, et al. “Everyone’s an Author.” W.W. Norton and Company, Second Edition,

New York, 2017.

Wolf, Maryanne. “Researcher Maryanne Wolf: Reading is not natural”. (Video file), 2011 https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-HYayerEeI.

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THANK YOU

Photo courtesy of Freepik

WRITING

“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”

—Jules Renard

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Photo courtesy of Pixabay