Overview:
The Kairos Journal is an ongoing reflective assignment designed to deepen and expand your understanding of rhetorical situations and how they occur in academic writing, current events, and our personal lives. The journal prompts are designed to check your understanding of the corresponding week’s readings. You’ll make weekly entries, in preparation for a mid-term collection and a final collection.
Instructions for Original Post:
- Make a weekly entry responding to the provided prompt. Each entry should be 300-500 words.
- Connect your reflections to course readings, discussions, and your own experiences or observations throughout the corresponding weeks class.
- Apply the concept of rhetorical analysis to your understanding of the readings from that week, as well as, its connection to your understanding of current events, or your own writing process throughout the semester.
- Please contemplate and reflect on the exigence of the situation, the positive and negative proofs in play, and who the rhetorical audience comprises.
- Relate your reflections to ongoing course assignments, when applicable.
- Use specific examples to illustrate your points.
- For these examples, ensure to include author tags (i.e., narrative and parenthetical in-text citations).
- Use a mix of paraphrasing and direct quotation from the readings.
- Proofread your entries for clarity and coherence.
- Self Evaluation:
- I encourage you to analyze the work you’ve completed every week. You don’t need to answer the following questions, but these are the types of questions I want you to analyze and contemplate in relation to your performance as a student in this class.
- Did you put at least an hour of thoughtful reading and note taking into every reading? Were you actively and critically reading the homework?
- What do you think about the work you completed this week? Your participation in class.
- Assign yourself a grade for this week. How well do you believe you participated as a student in this class?
- Please note: be honest in this portion. I won’t dock you for honesty. I ask that you genuinely reflect on yourself and your work–this is not a place for condemnation or judgement on an honest self-assessment.
Prompt:
- Now that you’ve submitted your Issue Proposal, reflect on how Ede and Lunsford’s concept of “audience as shapers of discourse” and Rose’s ideas about “writing in public” influenced your initial approach to understanding your audience for the proposal. How might your conception of audience in this early stage of your research impact your writing process moving forward?
- Consider, too, how kairos plays a role in your evolving understanding of audience and the rhetorical situation surrounding your issue. As you continue to research and write, how might your sense of the opportune moment to engage your audience shift?
- Drawing on Mao’s discussion of the diversity of rhetorics and Anzalda’s exploration of language and identity, analyze the rhetorical situation of a potential OER you may use. How do the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the authors, intended audience, and yourself shape your understanding of the OER’s exigence, constraints, and persuasive strategies?
- I encourage you to analyze the work you’ve completed every week. You don’t need to answer the following questions, but these are the types of questions I want you to analyze and contemplate in relation to your performance as a student in this class.
