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Reаd this pаssаge and then fоllоw the instructiоns after the excerpt to complete the rhetorical analysis: About the Author and Text Laura Giovanelli is a writing instructor and scholar whose work focuses on writing and the teaching of writing. She has taught writing at Wake Forest University. “Strong Writing and Writers Don’t Need Revision” was published in Bad Ideas About Writing, an open-access collection edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe that brings together writing scholars to challenge common misconceptions about writing. For this midterm, you will read an excerpt from Giovanelli’s text below. “Strong Writing and Writers Don’t Need Revision” Laura Giovanelli — Excerpt “The standard perception that revision is something that happens at the end of the writing process is a good place to start revising ideas about revision.”—Cathleen Breidenbach The fantasy that good writers summon forth beautiful, lean, yet intricate sentences onto a page without sweating is an unhealthy fiction, and it is wrong. What writers need is revision. Novice writers, experienced writers, all writers. Anyone interested in writing clearer, stronger, more persuasive and passionate prose, even those of us who are procrastinators panicking because we need to get a project finished or a paper written and it’s 2:00 a.m. the night before our deadline—writers need revision because revision is not a discrete step. Revision is not the thing writers do when they’re done writing. Revision is the writing. It’s important to keep in mind I’m not talking about revision as proofreading or copy editing; no amount of grammatical, spelling, and style corrections transforms a piece of writing like focused attention to fundamental questions about purpose, evidence, and organization. That, to me, is revision: the heavy lifting of working through why I’m writing, who I’m writing for, and how I structure writing logically and effectively. Revision is Writing My writing students are usually relieved to hear that published authors often find writing just as fraught as they do. Like first-year college students, people paid to write—the journalists and the novelists and the technical writers—more often than not despair at the difference between what’s in their heads and hearts and what ends up on the page the first time around. The professionals are just a little better at waiting things out, pushing through what Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts” and all the ones that follow, the revision of a tenth and a thirteenth and a twenty-third draft. I show a YouTube video by Tim Weninger, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Notre Dame. In the video, Weninger stitches together his revisions of a research paper. In my class, we play a game, guessing how many revisions Weninger did. The answer—463!—almost always surprises them. It still sometimes surprises me. And sure, some of those revisions are small, fiddly changes. But most of the time, even watching this quickly on classroom monitors, my students notice Weninger aims for the jugular in his writing. He’s after wholesale overhaul of his argument and of his larger work. However, talking about revision in terms of numbers of drafts implies that all writing, all writers, and all revision work one way: hit your target draft number, like your daily Fitbit goals, and you magically get good writing. But more revision isn’t necessarily better. Effective revising isn’t making changes for the sake of change, but instead making smarter changes. And professional writers—practiced writers—have this awareness even if they aren’t aware of it. In Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, he calls this instinct the ideal reader: an imagined person a writer knows and trusts but rewrites in response to, a kind of collaborative dance between writer and reader. To writers, the act of writing is an act of thinking. One writer in a landmark study of comparing the habits of experienced writers to those of novices called their first drafts “the kernel.” If you’re someone like me who is constantly struggling to demystify this complex cognitive thing we humans do, that metaphor of writing as a seed is revelatory. Revision is not a sign of weakness or inexperienced or poor writing. It is the writing. The more writers push through chaos to get to the good stuff, the more they revise. The more writers revise, whether that be the keystrokes they sweat in front of a blinking, demanding cursor or the unofficial revising they do in our heads when they’re showering or driving or running, the more the ideal reader becomes a part of their craft and muscle memory, of who they are as writers, so at some point they may not know where the writing stops and the revision begins. Revision: Alive and Kicking All this revision talk could lead to the counterargument that revision is a death spiral, a way of shoving off the potential critique of a finished draft forever. Tinkering is something we think of as quaint, but not very efficient. Writers can always make the excuse that something is a work-in-progress, that they just don’t have time for all this revision today. But this critique echoes the point that writing is social and responsive to its readers. Writing is almost always meant to be read and responded to, not hoarded away. A recent large-scale study by Paul Anderson, Chris Anson, and other writing researchers supports the idea that specific interventions in the writing process matter more in learning to write rather than how much students are writing. Among these useful interventions are participation in a lively revision culture and an interactive and social writing process such as talking over drafts—soliciting feedback from instructors and classmates. Extending the modern definition of writing more broadly to composing in any medium, revision is as bound to writing as breathing is to living. If anything, humans are doing more writing and revision today. Revision as writing is an idea that we should not abandon or trash. And it may not even be possible to. Rhetorical Analysis Now that you have read the excerpt from Laura Giovanelli's “Strong Writing and Writers Don't Need Revision,” perform a rhetorical analysis of the text. You have already practiced this type of analysis with “The Seven False Beliefs.” Just as you did in that assignment, you will identify the five main aspects of the rhetorical situation and, most importantly, explain how you reached your conclusions. You may use the Chapter 5: Rhetorical Situations PDF linked in the Midterm module as a reference while completing this portion of the exam. Your Task Identify and briefly analyze the following five aspects of the rhetorical situation. Make sure you use the rhetorical vocabulary we have learned: purpose, audience, stance, genre, and medium. For each aspect, you need to do two things: Identify it. Explain how you figured it out. What specific characteristics or choices in the excerpt led you to your conclusion? 1. Purpose What is Giovanelli's purpose in writing this text? What does she want the audience to understand, think, believe, or do after reading it? Explain what you noticed in the excerpt that helped you determine her purpose. 2. Audience Who is the intended audience for this text? What does Giovanelli seem to assume the audience already knows, and what does she believe they need to understand or learn? Explain what clues helped you determine the intended audience. Consider the information she includes, what she explains, the examples she chooses, and the way she addresses readers. 3. Stance What is Giovanelli's stance, or attitude toward the topic and audience? For example, does she seem concerned, critical, supportive, skeptical, encouraging, objective, passionate, or something else? Explain what you noticed about her language and tone that led you to your conclusion. 4. Genre What is the genre of this text? Don't stop at simply identifying it as an “article” or “reading.” Think about what kind of text it is and what it is designed to accomplish. Use both the excerpt and the introductory information provided about the author and publication to help you determine the genre. What characteristics—such as its organization, content, language, purpose, or approach to the subject—support your answer? 5. Medium What is the medium through which this text was originally published? Use the introductory information provided before the excerpt, along with what you have learned about medium, to help you answer this question. Explain how that medium affects the way the information can be presented and experienced by its readers. What does this medium allow the writer to do? How might the experience be different if the same ideas were communicated through another medium, such as a speech, video, podcast, or social media post? Make a Connection The different parts of a rhetorical situation don't exist separately. They influence the choices a writer makes and often influence one another. Choose two of the five elements above and explain how you think they are connected in Giovanelli's text. For example, you might consider: How does the author's purpose influence the genre? How does the intended audience influence the author's stance or tone? How does the medium help the author reach the intended audience? How do the audience and purpose work together to influence choices the author makes? You only need to explain one connection from the two elements. The goal is to show that you understand how different parts of the rhetorical situation work together. How to Submit Your Response You do not need to write an essay for this portion of the midterm. Organize your response using the following headings: PurposeAudienceStanceGenreMediumConnection Under each heading, answer the questions above in complete sentences. Remember: Don't just identify each element of the rhetorical situation. Explain how you know. Your reasoning is an important part of your response.