TYPES OF WRITING STYLES Developed from "About Writing"

There are four main types of writing: EXPOSITORY, DESCRIPTIVE, PERSUASIVE, AND NARRATIVE. Each of these writing styles is used for a specific purpose. A single text may include more than one writing style if the author chooses to do so. When an author is writing for himself, he can choose to intertwine writing styles if he wishes, but this freedom does not apply to writings crafted in a school-setting or assignments for work. Those writings require specific style, content, and structure to be followed.

For papers written for a specific purpose, to a specific audience, in a specific classroom, as part of a graded assignment, the author must follow the writing style assigned by the instructor. Instructors at the college-level will typically assign a persuasive argument assignment, and so the specific details relating to that style of writing must always be adhered to. At the college-level, authors will always assess the writing prompt for clear details as to what writing style is assigned and the key specifics that the instructor will require.

EXPOSITORY

Expository writing is one of the most common types of writing. When an author writes in an expository style, all they are trying to do is explain a concept, imparting information from themselves to a wider audience. Expository writing does not include the author’s opinions but focuses on accepted facts about a topic, including statistics or other evidence. The purpose of this style of writing is simply to EXPOSE information about a topic—with an even-hand and free from bias.

DESCRIPTIVE

Descriptive writing is often found in fiction, though it can make an appearance in nonfiction as well (for example, memoirs, first-hand accounts of events, or travel guides). When an author writes in a descriptive style, they are painting a picture in words of a person, place, or thing for their audience. The author might employ metaphor or other literary devices in order to describe the author’s impressions via their five senses (what they hear, see, smell, taste, or touch). But the author is not trying to convince the audience of anything or explain the scene – merely describe things as they are.

PERSUASIVE

Persuasive writing is the main style of writing you will use in academic papers. When authors write in a persuasive style, they are trying to convince the audience of a position or belief. Persuasive writing contains the author’s opinions and biases, as well as justifications and logical reasoning given by the author as evidence of the correctness of his/her position. The evidence and assertions presented by an author writing a persuasive essay will contain source materials from scholarly sources. These sources will be used to defend the assertions already made by the author in the paper. The sources will not ‘make’ the argument for the author. The sources defend the argument that was already declared by the author. Any “argumentative” essay you write in a school-setting will be in the persuasive style of writing.

NARRATIVE

Narrative writing is used in almost every longer piece of writing, whether fiction or nonfiction. When an author writes in a narrative style, they are not just trying to impart information, they are trying to construct and communicate a story, complete with characters, conflict, and settings.

RESEARCH

Research writing is used at various educational levels and for various reasons. However, research writing requires one main skill: locating, integrating, and properly documenting sources in a specific format: MLA, APA, or Turabian. When an author writes using research, the purpose of that writing can be to expose a situation, argue a side of an issue, or to present findings relating to a current issue. When writing in a paper with research, you are writing in a style that requires the use of 3rd person voice. Do not include 1st or 2nd person voice in any academic writings.

Friday, February 8, 2019

RHETORICAL CONCEPTS

RHETORICAL CONCEPTS

During your time as a student of writing, you may hear instructors talk about “rhetorical situations.” This is a term used to talk about any set of circumstances in which one person is trying to change another person’s mind about something, most often via text (like a book, or blog post, or journal article).
These rhetorical situations can be better understood by examining the rhetorical concepts that they are built from. The philosopher Aristotle called these concepts logos, ethos, pathos, telos, and kairos – also known as text, author, audience, purposes, and setting.

TEXT (LOGOS)

Texts can come in all shapes and sizes, such as those listed earlier. But in this context, text is not limited to something written down. The text in a rhetorical situation could be a film, or a photograph, or a recording of a song or history. The important thing to ask yourself when faced with a text, no matter what it is, is what is gained by having the text composed in this format/genre. What are the relevant characteristics of a book versus a song? What might an oral history version of a text communicate that a book version would not?

AUTHOR (ETHOS)

Here the “author” of a text is the creator, the person utilizing communication to try to effect a change in their audience. An author doesn’t have to be a single person, or a person at all – an author could be an organization. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, examine the identity of the author and their background. Not only do you want to know what kind of experience they have in the subject, but you’ll also want to explore basic biographical information about them. Where and when did they grow up? How could that affect their perspective on the topic?

AUDIENCE (PATHOS)

The audience is any person or group who is the intended recipient of the text, and also the person/people the text is trying to influence. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, examine who the intended audience is and what their background may be. An audiences’ assumptions about the author, the context in which they are receiving the text, their own demographic information (age, gender, etc.) can all effect how the text is seeking to engage with them.

PURPOSES (TELOS)

What is the author hoping to achieve with the communication of this text? What do they want from their audience? What does the audience want from the text and what may they do once the text is communicated? Both author and audience can have purpose and it’s important to understand what those might be in the rhetorical situation of the text you are examining. An author may be trying to inform, to convince, to define, to announce, or to activate, while an audience’s purpose may be to receive notice, to quantify, to feel a sense of unity, to disprove, to understand, or to criticize. Any and all of these purposes determine the ‘why’ behind the decisions both groups make.

SETTING (KAIROS)

Nothing happens in a vacuum, and that includes the text you are trying to understand. It was written in a specific time, context, and/or place, all of which can affect the way the text communicates its message. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, examine the setting of both audience and author and ask yourself if there was a particular occasion or event that prompted the particular text at the particular time it was written.

LICENSE

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Rhetorical Concepts by Robin Jeffrey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)