Helping Writers Think Rhetorical Analysis

Journal Response The chapter “Helping Writers Think Rhetorically” by John C. Bean describes how important it is to have students thinking about their audience and purpose before starting to write their compositions. Bean explains how thinking about a targeted audience will give the writers a better idea about their audiences´ thinking before reading their papers and the expectations after having read their works. In the study, Bean comments that most of the times students mistake by thinking of their teacher as their only audience for their composition project. Therefore, Bean highlights the need to have students practicing writing to imaginary audiences in order to develop their skills to target different mindsets using different rhetorical …show more content…
The three main recommendations to consider are the purpose, audience and genre. The different questions and strategies to practice rhetorical thinking are well explained and design to favor writers in all composition projects. To start the analysis of this chapter, I found this reading easier to digest than Lindemanns´ work (both targeting the term rhetoric). Lindemanns´ work gave me a perspective of the history and development of the rhetorical practice throughout the years but, Bean´s work taught me specific questions that I can implement in class to start helping my student´s to think rhetorically in order to improve their writing projects. To point out, as a student, I also tend to make the mistake of focusing my wiring assignments to my teacher as my only audience, but now with the rhetoric mindset I understand the value of practicing writing to different audiences and for different purposes. By practice and error is how learning is done and improved. Another important strategy to implement the rhetorical thinking is considering the different genres. Bean suggests different examples that now gave me a better idea of how to target writing compositions with my students from different types of