Rhetorical Analysis Of David Murray

Rhetorical Analysis “Having made his living as a writer (including winning a Pulitzer prize as a newspaper columnist, writing textbooks, and publishing a range of poetry and fiction), Murray disagreed. Writing, he thought, is always personal, whatever else it is." (page 65). Murray in this literary work takes the voice of an educator, and generates a grandfatherly narrative, even though this is an academic writing. The way he writes this academic work portrayed the meaning behind the paper, the way he writes the paper promotes his message of autobiographical influence. He is providing the audience with a great amount of work that portray a different amount of autobiographical influence in it, he uses some of his collective works, including …show more content…
This being such a large exigence has to be proved with a large amount of evidence. This is the precise reason he has too many quotations from other works in this writing. He wrote this paper in this way to relate to a substantial amount of writers who are less experienced and not cognizant of the autobiographical nature of writing, “over the years it’s possible for a writer to shape himself as a human being through the language he uses.” (page 71). All of the writing that you do throughout your life is influenced by your past knowledge and experiences. All of the writing you do reflects who you were and who you are becoming, writers are influenced by their work just as much as readers are influenced by them. “We become what we write. That is one of the great wonders of writing. I am best known as a nonfiction writer, but I write fiction and poetry to free myself of small truths in the hope of achieving large ones.” (page 71) In nonfiction writing the author may not be expressly aware of his autobiographical influence, however when you write fiction the influence is boundless and you are able to observe your influence far more. Murray wants the readers to be aware of their autobiographical voice in their work and to embrace that voice as a necessary part of the writing; something existential that molds our writing forever to …show more content…
This means that Murray has to use significant evidence and provide a large amount of reasoning for each work he included in the piece and provide good evidence for them. Murray is also constricted by having written many other past works, not being a new voice in this community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Murray is expected to come up with a great amount of credibility to whatever he says. This can be a good thing for the paper seeing as how he is a prominent figure; the audience is more likely to reason with his claim. However, because his work has in the past also been quite academic with more monotone of a narrative as was previously thought to be the “perfect” academic voice, some of his audience now will question why the sudden change in narrative concepts. That can also be a constraint, other writers and also students of literature may not understand exactly why academic papers don’t have to be completely devoid of emotion. This is also the reason for the exigence in a way, showing that you can and do put an autobiographical twist on work you