WRIT 340 – Arts & Humanities – Supplemental Writing Guidelines

Purpose: Research in rhetoric and composition shows pretty clearly that one of the best ways to improve writing skill is to (unsurprisingly) practice writing on a regular basis. For this reason, you will be doing various supplemental writing assignments that are meant to develop your technique at the same time that you deepen your understanding of the genres and themes that are pertinent to the arts and humanities. Additionally, these shorter assignments should give you a sharper understanding of genre, and of the different ways you can appeal to the needs of different audiences.

Instructions: Starting in Week 3, you will need to need to make some adjustments to your style and technique as you hand in each of these supplemental writings. For each assignment, you’ll need to make sure to incorporate three elements: Audience Adjustments, Manner of Appeal, and Rhetorical Technique:

Week
Audience Adj.
Manner of Appeal
Technique
Week 3 (6/1-6/3)

Professional
Pathos
Ciceronian
Week 4 (6/8-6/10)
Professional

Ethos
From the Readings
Week 5 (6/15-6/17)
Professional

Logos
Ciceronian
Week 6 (6/22-6/24)
Lay

Ethos
From the Readings
Week 7 (6/29-7/1)
Lay

Logos
Ciceronian
Week 8 (7/6-7/8)
Lay

Pathos
From the Readings
Week 9 (7/13-7/15)
Targeted

Ethos
Ciceronian
Week 10 (7/20-7/22)
Targeted

Pathos
From your chosen publication

Audience Adjustment refers to the stylistic adjustments that you will need to make based on the audience in question. Your word choice, sentence structure, and handling of topic will change depending on whether you are addressing a professional or lay audience. Professional writing reflects an understanding of the jargon, values, and concerns of people with a strong intellectual, financial, or professional stake in the topic; writing aimed at a lay audience, on the other hand, tends to assume that readers will be less familiar with the issues at hand, and that they are likely reading for leisure.

To earn the point for this element, you need to clearly frame your prose such that it is appealing to the given audience. So, your writing for the professional audience (for example) will likely be more “dense,” with longer, more complex sentence structures.

Manner of Appeal is derived from Aristotle’s famous triad of rhetorical appeals: “pathos” is an appeal to emotion; “logos” is an appeal to rationality and logic; “ethos” is an appeal to the character of the speaker—an appeal to reliability or authority. To earn the point, the appeal needs to be clear, but it should be included with finesse. A lame or treacly appeal to pathos won’t get you the point: your appeal to emotion should be smart and effective. Similarly, an appeal to a false authority for ethos (“Kim Kardashian wears Prada, which shows us how it is part of the high-fashion canon”), won’t work.

Technique means a specific, discrete writing technique: use of certain kinds of punctuation; short paragraphs; epigraphs; footnotes; epistrophe; metaphor; and so on. For weeks that call for a technique “From the Readings,” you should draw upon something you noticed the author(s) doing in the assigned reading. If (for