Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [212]
Think of transitions as echoes in the service of continuity. If you study the transitions in a piece, you will usually find that they echo either the language or the ideas of something that precedes them as they point to what is ahead.
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Try This 15.2: Tracking Transitions
As an exercise in becoming more conscious of how transitions shape thinking, track the transitions in a piece of writing. Take a few pages of something you are reading (preferably a complete piece, such as a short article) and circle or underline all of the directional indicators. Remember to check not only the beginnings of paragraphs but within them. Then, survey your markings. What do you notice now about the shape of the piece? This exercise is also useful for expanding your repertoire of transitional words to use in your own writing. As an alternative, track the transitional wording in the next section of this chapter.
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C. The Rhetoric of Form
Thus far, we have talked about form primarily in relation to the search for meaning. We’ve demonstrated that some forms of arranging ideas (5 paragraph form, for example) interfere with a writer’s ability to have ideas in the first place. Whatever form one uses, we’ve argued, it has to be flexible enough to allow ideas to evolve. The point is that there are various factors influencing a writer’s decisions about forms and formats. These include both the demands of the subject itself and those of the discourse community within which the writing seeks to communicate.
We now wish to expand on the role that a writer’s sense of his or her audience plays in determining the formal presentation of ideas. We have entitled this section “The Rhetoric of Form” to emphasize the effects that a chosen form has on an audience—on its receptiveness to a writer’s ideas, for example.
The study of rhetoric is primarily concerned with the various means at a writer’s (or speaker’s) disposal for influencing the views of an audience. In early rhetorics, Greek and Roman writers divided these means into three large categories—ethos, logos, and pathos—that you encountered earlier in this book in our definition of analysis (see Chapter 3). We’ll use these categories for organizing what we wish to say about the relationship between formal structures and audience.
Ethos refers to the character of the speaker or writer. If an audience perceives a speaker to be ethical and rational, it will be inclined to perceive her or his argument as ethical and rational too. Thus, writers attend to the kind of persona they become on the page, the personality conveyed by the words and the tone of the words. In classical orations—the grandparent of virtually all speech and essay formats—the first section was always allotted to particular means of establishing an appealing persona, one whom an audience would want to listen to and believe. (See the next section, “The Classical Oration Format”.)
Logos refers to the character of the thinking itself: the rational component, evident in the presence and development of the ideas.
Pathos includes appeals to the audience’s emotions—which writing does all of the time, whether a writer wants it to or not. It is possible to think of the form of a paper in terms of how it might negotiate the likes and dislikes, the hopes and fears, of its assumed audience. If, for instance, you were to present an argument in favor of a position with which you knew in advance that your audience was predisposed to disagree, you would probably choose to delay making a case for this position until you had found various ways of earning that audience’s trust. By contrast, when presenting an argument to an audience of like-minded people, you would be much more likely to start out with the position you planned to advance.