In P1.2 Key Rhetorical Concepts, you explored some rhetorical concepts which might be familiar: audience, purpose, genre, context, and rhetorical situation. In ENC 1102, you will be asked to apply these concepts to academic writing. To do this, you must first know what academic writing is and what it entails.

Look over these resources to better understand how these rhetorical concepts apply to the genre of academic writing:

• Academic Writing: Purpose
• Academic Writing: Audience
• Academic Writing: Context

Academic Writing as a Genre

Academic (or scholarly) writing is a genre usually in the form of journal articles or books and is standard within institutions of higher education, such as USF. As with any genre, academic writing has rhetorical conventions that shape its form and content. For example, many academic journal articles use headings to partition the articles into sections. This genre convention helps with understanding how the essay is organized and what the goal/purpose is for each section. Other genre conventions for academic writing include but are not limited to: thesis statements, abstracts, introductions, conclusions, literature reviews, use of other scholarly sources for evidence, citation of sources, paragraphs with indentations, etc. Although the content of a piece of academic writing will vary based on the discipline you are writing for, generally these genre conventions appear across disciplines.

Exercise

Now that we have a general sense of what academic writing is, on a separate sheet of paper, write a response to the following questions based on the readings above:

1. Who is the typically the audience for academic/scholarly writing (be as specific as possible)? Why is this group the audience?
2. Generally, what would you say is the goal(s) or purpose(s) of academic writing?
3. How does the concept of context apply to academic writing and why is it important?