Cassie Lagner- Miller and Wardle

I thought the first reading by Wardle “You Can Learn to Write In General” was easy in the sense that it was not dense. But the second reading by Miller, I felt was very dense and hard to follow. The person talking in the first reading was Elizabeth Wardle. Wardle is Howe Professor and a director of the Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami of Ohio. She works at Iowa State University. I feel the primary audience for her reading is college students either in a writing major or simply writing for a class they have to take. I feel this way because the reading was not dense and it was understandable. I think this implies that it is satire because satirical rhetoric is bringing attention to social criticism. The main argument of this text implies that no one (no matter how good of a writer you are) can just write in general. Whenever someone writes they are always writing for a purpose or a reason, no on can just write in general and without thinking. This differs from Bitzer, Edbauer, or Herndl and Brown because their main focus is speaking about rhetoric and rhetorical ecologies. But instead Wardle talking about writing in general. The primary purpose is to just show that people, no matter who, can no just write for no reason. The second reading we did was by Miller, called “Genre as Social Action”. The person talking in this was Carolyn R. Miller. Miller was the founding director of NC State’s Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. She mainly concentrated in Writing and Editing. The primary audience for this text is colleagues, other rhetoricians or writers. I feel this was because this reading was very dense and often hard to follow. I feel someone with a bit more experience in this field would understand this reading a lot better than a college student, like me, would. In the title the text says this reading is genre as social action. This means it is based on conventionalized social motives which are found in recurrent situation-types. The main point in this writing is that she is trying to show that over time genres change, or disappear. This texts rhetorical purpose is to educate people in the field of writing.