The following memorandum was assigned by professor Spring during the Spring semester of 2014 with the purpose of analyzing a persuasive writing document, in this case a pamphlet, by explaining the audience, the purpose, the genre, and the format that made the piece writing effective.  I found this particular selection from my Business Writing course to be strongly related to my study of rhetoric because it explicitly sought the rhetorical strategies at work within a modern piece of every-day business writing.  We specifically spoke about Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric in class and then applied it to the world of business through this memorandum.  The consideration of audience was of particular importance for this artifact, so important in fact, that the name of the audience–excluding the professor–was listed immediately in the first line.

This artifact stands out among my eight not only because it is an example of a different genre of writing than I normally do, but because its purpose was to analyze the verbal and the nonverbal techniques at work.  This was the first time that format and image came to the forefront of my analysis.  Because of this assignment, I started noticing how the visual is rhetoric.  Looking now, I find the document to be clear and easy to follow because I reveal each part of the object in question in logical order.  It is well organized and formatted for the type of writing that it is, but most of my sentences still begin with “it” or “the”.