There are several rhetorical strategies you can use to make
your writing more powerful. It is often a good idea to use several of
these strategies in combination, although not every strategy will be
applicable to every essay or topic you are discussing.
- Exemplification: Provide examples or cases in
point. Are there examples - facts, statistics, cases in point, personal
experiences, interview quotations - that you could add to help you
achieve the purpose of your essay?
- Description: Detail sensory
perceptions of a person, place, or thing. Does a person, place, or
object play a prominent role in your essay? Would the tone, pacing, or
overall purpose of your essay benefit from sensory details?
- Narration: Recount an event. Are
you trying to report or recount an anecdote, an experience, or an event?
Does any part of your essay include the telling of a story (either
something that happened to you or to a person you include in your
essay)?
- Process analysis: Explain how to
do something or how something happens. Would any portion of your essay
be more clear if you included concrete directions about a certain
process? Are there any processes that readers would like to understand
better? Are you evaluating any processes?
- Comparison and contrast: Discuss
similarities and differences. Does your essay contain two or more
related subjects? Are you evaluating or analyzing two or more people,
places, processes, events, or things? Do you need to establish the
similarities and differences between two or more elements?
- Division and classification:
Divide a whole into parts or sort related items into categories. Are you
trying to explain a broad and complicated subject? Would it benefit your
essay to reduce this subject to more manageable parts to focus your
discussion?
- Definition: Provide the meaning
of terms you use. Who is your audience? Does your essay focus on any
abstract, specialized, or new terms that need further explanation so
your readers understand your point? Does any important word in your
essay have many meanings and need to be need to be clarified?
- Cause and effect analysis: Analyze
why something happens and describe the consequences of a string of
events. Are you examining past events or their outcomes? Is your purpose
to inform, speculate, or argue about why an identifiable fact happens
the way it does?
- Argumentation: Convince others
through reasoning. Are you trying to explain aspects of a particular
subject, and are you trying to advocate a specific opinion on this
subject or issue in your essay?
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