My Rhetorical Action Plan

In this blog post, I will completely answer the three following questions regarding, audience, genre, and response/actions. For the genre questions, I will specifically discuss the elements of two different genres I may write in for project 3.

Screenshot from my computer, 10/28/15

1. Audience - I am going to try to persuade young adults invested in public education.

• Knowledge - The audience is not likely to know a great deal about computer science education and the exact logistics of bringing widespread computer science education to schools. Some audience members might have to be convinced of the importance of computer science in the first place.
• Values - This audience values education and optimizing the opportunities we give our future generations. This is very important to address and understand when I construct an argument aimed at this audience.
• Standards of Argument - I think research on the benefits of a diverse education, along with statistics on the relevance of computer science in general should help convince my audience. Little translation should be needed if the statistics are straightforward.
• Visual Elements - My audience might respond to some illustrated statistics about the need for computer science students. This will put the matter of computer science education into a more clear perspective.
• Purpose - My audience is reading my argument because they care about public education. I'm trying to expose the truth behind implementing computer science education into public schools. My argument is (hopefully) likely to motivate my audience to push for more resources in our public schools to teach computer science with.

2. Genre

• Blog (Example 1, Example 2)
• This genre is designed to give the reader fast information. The blog avoids all the formalities of formal writing and gets right to the meat of the argument. 
• This genre is exclusively used online.
• I'm likely to use the three main rhetorical appeals, especially logos. This topic is about education, so I should speak intelectually.
• Graphs and other illustrated statistics are effective in this genre
• I will use a more informal tone in this genre
• Video (Example 1, Example 2)
• This genre is designed to give lots of visual information, as well as audio. It's very effective in attracting a large audience, since a video is easy to consume.
• This genre takes place online, mostly.
• In a video, emotional and logical appeal are most prominent. The abilitiy to have constant visuals caters to these appeals best.
• Lots of powerful images and video clips on computer science are most effective in this specifc setting.
• This genre can be either formal or informal. If I choose this genre, I will take an informal tone.

3. Responses/Actions

• Positive Reactions
• Excitement for the future of computer science
• Sense of urgency to change how we teach computer science and improve our current resources for teaching it
• Greater involvement in local politics in order to change how we teach computer science
• Learning computer science 
• Negative Rebuttals
• "Everyone deserves to learn computer science right now" / Of course, in an ideal world, eveyrone would be able to learn computer science right now. Unfortunatley, most schools don't have the resources to teach computer science on a large scale. We need to attack the root of the problem which is a lack of computer science experts in our schools.
• "Computer science is not important" / In the United States, the number of computer science jobs is three times greater than the number of computer scientists students today. Nearly every company will rely on some kind of computer, and we need computer scientists to manage them.
• "Computer science takes too much money to teach" / While it is optimal to teach computer science using nice, new technology, it is not necessary. It's actually quite possible to learn the basics of computer science using just a paper and pencil.