I was reading my argumentative writing textbook again this week and the chapter I was reading was about the arrangement of rhetorical writing; the way you organize and put your arguments together. I think this is should be a very important focus of argumentative papers because a variety of things can affect how well a paper comes together or how persuasive it actually is. One of the most important things, in my mind, is the introduction of a paper.
As my textbook states, “It is necessary to explain to an audience why they should pay attention to a discourse if the issue taken up in the discourse is ambiguous, mean, or obscure” (Crowley, 300). In many of the papers I have written for assignments in school, the topics of the papers have often seemed unimportant, or having very little meaning, at least pertaining to anyone outside of my classroom. Inside of the classroom, the topics of these papers makes sense to only the audience within the class, but as I have learned this year in my argumentative writing class, it is important to keep in mind a broader audience, defining all terms and explaining any discourses taken within the paper. In this case, it is important to have something in your introduction that grabs the attention of a wider audience, one larger than the audience confined only to the classroom.
To do this, one option would be to prevent kairos. As I have mentioned in a previous blog entry, kairos provides relevance or reason for discussing something or raising an argument. This is what I often try to do in my own writing. I think it is very effective to provide kairos in an introduction of an argumentative writing paper because it makes an audience attentive to the subject that will be discussed throughout the paper. To do this, I usually provide my audience with a story that is relevant to the argument I will be making. Stories, or anecdotes provide excellent kairos for discussing topics because I feel that the audience can relate to stories and if they are presented right of the bat in an introduction of a paper, the audience will be more attentive and take a deeper interest in the paper.
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