My Rhetorical Action Plan

In the following blog post I will address how I will manage the rhetoric of my text. I will look at the three components, audience, genre, and responses/action by answering the questions from Writing Public Lives. 

Y., Nick. "Action Plan" 7/2015 via PicServer. CC BY-SA 3.0 License.  

Audience: 

• Knowledge: I am assuming that my audience is made up of non-environmental studies major students. Therefore the knowledge they have on the subject I expect to be little to none especially in the technical specifics. The information they would have about fracking I expect they got from big news stories, and because of the nature of the stories that make the news I anticipate the information they have made them on the slightly more anti-fracking side. 

• Values: I think my audience believes in what they've been told. Natural gas is a cleaner-burn energy source than something like coal, but they have not been told of all of the negatives that fracking can causes unintentionally. Also, I think most college kids are environmentally conscious, but to varying degrees.

• Standards of Argument: The best statistics I can provide for my audience would be very current numbers that show long-term trends. I am writing for millennials, and we are very invested more in what affects us than in the past or future. Also, the long-term statistics show what will happen to us now and in the future, which is more relevant for this generation.

• Visual Elements: I think visual elements like charts, to show a large group of data quickly, and relevant emotion-causing pictures will be the most helpful.   

• Purpose: The purpose of my argument is to educate my audience on a topic they might be familiar with, but not experts. I am not trying to use my argument to motivate my audience to act a certain way, just to understand the different sides of the fracking issue. 

Genre: 
Examples of the blog genre that would appeal to college students. Boing Boing and TreeHugger. Another possible genre I could write in would be a QRG. A few examples of QRGs are this one about the world series  (go Royals) and this one about time management.

• Function: The function of the blog genre would be to give relevant information quickly, while keeping it interesting to hold the reader's attention. Similarly, the QRG would present the information to the audience in a straight forward and easy way, but would provide more information than a blog post.

• Setting: The setting of my genre is online. Its made to be easily accessible and easy to digest. I could see it being used on popular social media sites. 

• Rhetorical Appeals: I think because the most useful rhetorical appeal for me would be to use ethos. The biggest challenge I have to face is to make my audience care about a subject that they may have no current interest in. 

• Visual Elements: I think  I will utilize visual images. Like I stated above, I think the most useful visual aids would be ones that can provide a lot of information quickly and ones that will generate a lot of emotion.  

• Style: The most effective style for me will be an informal style that excludes a lot of technical jargon and doesn't turn the audience off by feeling overly pretentious. 

Responses/Action: 

I am not really looking for my audience to take any big actions after they read my argument, but I would like them to be better educated than they were prior to reading my text and to be more conscious of the environment. 

Positive Reactions:

1. After reading my argument my audience could share it to help me reach a larger group of My people. 
2. My audience could get involved with my post, because it will be in a public place, and they could comment. 
3. The audience could take what they learned from my argument and make their own blog posts or social media comment. 

Negative Reactions:

1. Comments are a double-edged sword, so my audience could get involved and leave negative comments on whatever platform I use to publish my article. 
2. My audience could complete ignore all of the content I provided. 
3. After reading my text the audience could write their own blog post/QRG with the intent to completely discredit mine.