Digital Rhetoric

What does rhetoric mean? It means speaking or writing persuasively to affect the audience. That can be a student wanting to persuade another student that they should switch lunches or snacks. Rhetoric is used in writing both in and out of school. So rhetoric would change if it was digital since not everyone is trying to be persuasive. Some people that are online are just trying to inform others while some people are trying to persuade others. Now what does digital rhetoric mean? It means a form of communication that is digital and isn’t focused on persuasion but on expressing oneself. It is also focused on building communities based off similar interests.

This could lead to many different categories of writing. Those being based of what the writing is attempting to do. This could be an email sent to a professor excusing an absence or sending condolences to someone. It can also be lab reports we write or nurses writing plans for how to care for a patient and even admission essays for colleges. There are many genres we encounter on a daily basis and because of that we are always adapting to writing within a new genre which can sometimes be easy or difficult. Something that is done a lot is looking at examples in order to understand a new genre of writing. Within those examples we can analyze and see the patterns to better understand how to go forward in attempting to write in a new genre.  An example of this is when a student needs to write a report but the instructions that were given were vague. So the student goes ahead and looks at sample reports in order to get a better understanding of what they should do. This helps the student with ensuring that they are adding the right things and are following the vague instructions that were given.

Since we encounter many genres on a daily basis and we are adapting to them, we try to analyze and understand these moves. These moves are rhetorical moves that help us identify the particular function or action from the text. A move can be a part of just a sentence, a paragraph or even a longer piece of text. A move can also be interpreted differently, meaning that one’s interpretation is different to someone else’s. An example of a move would be a review of a food item at a restaurant. The first move of that review would be evaluating the entire restaurant, then the second move would be evaluating the specific dish and lastly would be providing the details of how much it cost. Another example would be a wedding invitation since it would have a date, a time, a place and who exactly is inviting. If it didn’t have that information, it would just be a card being sent almost like a random letter from a company. It only has information, but it doesn’t explain anything else.