Defining Objectives and the Importance of Tone

Worksheet for Proposal: 

My thoughts on tone come belatedly this week, as it turns out twenty-first birthdays are not conducive to remembering one's homework assignments. However, I did get a lot of birthday cards, and one in particular stood out to me for the purposes of this assignment. A friend in my MgtOp 301 class passed me a handmade card, on the front of which were twenty-one hand-drawn  roses and the words "Happy Birthday, Michelle!" The inside read: "Don't get too drunk!! =P See you bright and early Saturday Morning at 9 A.M."

On the surface, the text is friendly and playful. The use of contractions and casual banter signal a significant level of familiarity and comfortableness. Her word choice denotes us as equals, or peers, and is obviously not intended for either a superior or subordinate. However, within the context of my relationship with this individual, the tone is still friendly and joking but is also a tactful reminder of our class contract for the group project we have in that class. Our group specified that anybody who is more than twenty minutes late to a meeting must buy the entire group lunch at the next group meeting. The time of this particular meeting was adjusted to 3pm to accommodate my inevitable late night the day before. This individual takes their schoolwork (and everything, really) quite seriously, so it is expected that everyone be punctual and show up operating at their best.

Her jokes teasing me about changing the meeting time at the last minute so that I will have to buy her lunch are really her way of compensating for her otherwise reserved and matter-of-fact persona. Thus, not only does this simple birthday card of only a few words say a lot more through tone, but also reflects a much deeper kind of tone based on the context of how we have related to each other in the past.

Rhetoric

Anything and everything can be constructed into an argument with the three rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos. Although skilled writers implement persuasive strategies in their writing deliberately, the use of ethos, pathos and logos are nearly inevitable. In fact, they surround our everyday world. Today I have come across images of Haiti, employing pathos to elicit donations, been handed a business card with a counselor's credentials, employing ethos as a means of proving credibility, and had a political debate with a close friend in which both of us had to substantiate our opinions with logical connections and facts (logos). Any kind of communication will contain some appeal to emotions, credibility or logic. However, armed with the knowledge of effective rhetorical strategies and with sufficient practice, we can use rhetoric to make all of our arguments and communication more effective. Rhetoric is the key to being persuasive in all kinds of writing, including those used in the business world.

Belated Thoughts on Writing

So, I’m not a slacker… I’m just memory challenged. This is why I keep a calendar by my side at all times. Sometimes I wonder when I became one of those people who is glued to a cell phone, day planner, and laptop (only for checking email of course. What is this Facebook you speak of?). When I really, truly, genuinely ponder when this transformation occurred, I cannot but notice that it lined up nearly perfectly with the timeline of when I stopped writing for pleasure.

I would like to describe myself as a creative individual, but in all practicality that hasn’t been true for quite some time. Between college and work I never find the time to write poetry or creative pieces. I don’t even allow myself to blog or write in a journal anymore. Until I was given this assignment, it hadn’t occurred to me just how much of a shame that actually is.

I have loved writing since I was little – more precisely, since the second grade. On Monday mornings when each student would share with the class what he or she had done over the weekend, everyone else’s stories always sounded so much more exciting than mine. So I decided to do something about it. Two weeks later, my mom was called in for a meeting with the teacher to see if everything was alright at home because I had been inventing stories about a step-sister in Sweden who came to visit me every weekend. During that meeting, they decided to enroll me in a creative writing workshop. I suppose I never stopped.

I won several poetry contests in middle school and high school and have been published in various anthologies a few times. I genuinely miss that time, when writing was still fun and not about maintaining a stellar GPA. I honestly look forward to learning about writing in the business world and how that differs from the writing we as students are accustomed to, but I think I need some balance. I think I need to remember what it was like to write expressively, for no other benefit than my own. Here is what I propose: for every blog post I complete for this class, I will write another in a separate blog to try and reconnect with what writing used to mean to me.

I’m not sure how successful I will be in this new goal, but I have high hopes – for both the class and my own writing. Wish me luck!

No more rhyming now, I mean it!

...Anybody want a peanut?