OWL

The Rhetorical Situation and the Establishing Arguments articles were both incredibly fascinating to me. Honestly, before I read these articles on the Purdue OWL website, I had very little to no idea what rhetoric was. Even though I have heard the word numerous times so far throughout my academic career as a student. The elements of a rhetorical situation was by far my favorite section of the readings. The descriptions are very straightforward and to the point. "Every rhetorical situation has four basic components: an author, an audience, a text of some sort, and a context in and through which each situation occurs." This is very simple and to the point. I love how after the mentioned author, audience, and text in bold, that they went into detail to talk about the author. They talked about the authors attitude, purpose, and background. It really gave me a good generalization about what was going on.

The second major section I read about was on Establishing arguments. This was very easy to get into. The headline read The Thesis statement or main claim must be debatable. This instantly set the tone for what the article was going to be about. Purdue online writing lab gave us an example of a non-debatable thesis statement, and a debatable thesis statement. I found this to be incredibly helpful. Another headline read that The thesis needs to be narrow. Once again, the author of this article gave us an example of a thesis statement that is too broad, and a narrow or focused thesis. In my personal opinion, I find examples of what to and what not to do to be the best way of learning. Mainly because other people often times have the same questions that you do on certain topics. The examples provide a quick and easy fix to our misunderstandings.