Audience and appropriate tone are important considerations in academic writing. This assignment is designed to help you consider your writing for various audiences and purposes. The Viewpoints Assignment consists of three one-page essays, each written for a specific audience.
Essay #1: You will try to persuade a friend to agree with you on your topic. This friend is likely to be receptive to your position, but he or she does not know much about the subject. You must first inform your friend, providing the facts that he or she needs to understand the your topic. (You may use tone and language that you would normally use when communicating with this friend.) Then, you should try to persuade your friend to see the issue from your perspective.
Essay #2: You must inform a bright high school student about your issue. Because this student is not particularly informed on the issue, you do not want to go too far in trying to persuade him or her to agree with you—you want to be ethical and make sure the student will be able to make up his or her own mind. You do, however, want to make sure your position is represented. You should present your side within the context of giving various positions on the topic.
Essay #3: You are writing for a well-educated college reader who soundly disagrees with you on your topic and position, holding an oppositional view. Your goal here is not to try to get your reader to agree, but to get him or her to consider your perspective on the issue. You should assume that this reader will be highly sensitive to the tone and language that you use. I recommend employing Rogerian techniques of argument here.
Each of these essays must be a minimum of one page long. Please clearly label each one below the heading. You may write slightly more (1.5-2 pages per essay), but your essays will lose points if they run short. You are not to use outside research for these essays. You may use reasoning, common knowledge (information that appears in three or more sources), and facts to support your claims. As these essays are so short, you might not write a conventional introduction and conclusion—you may decide to simply move into informing and/or persuading your reader. As each of these essays will be an entire page long, you will want to divide them into multiple paragraphs. Again, essays that run less that one full page long will be significantly marked down.
Please bring three complete copies for workshopping on Thursday, April 25th
Due: Thursday, May 2nd
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