For this week’s discussion choose one reading and one visual text.  Write one paragraph for each selection. (One written text and one visual text)

First focus is on the main idea. View the presentation below to begin your exploration of the thesis statement.  This is a course link to the discussion board. Select the title to access the discussion thread. You can access the full discussion board and view all the forums from the Discussion Board link in the course menu.
 

For this discussion, complete one main post and two peer responses. For full participation credit, posts must occur on three or more days during the active week. First post should occur on or before Wednesday. See rubric for full assessment of discussion posts.

Main Post #1: Choose one reading and one visual text from the options below and answer the following questions. (250 word minimum). Pose a question for your classmates to grapple with.Written Text  Answer Three Questions:

Rhetorical Modes.pptx Rhetorical Modes.pptx – Alternative Formats   Rhetorical Modes Handout x Rhetorical Modes Handout x – Alternative Formats  

Visual Text  Answer Three Questions:

• What is the main idea or thesis?
• Describe the conflict or tension
• How do the elements in the image support the main message?

Rhetorical Strategies

As you plan your essay, you will want to think about the rhetorical strategies by which you will present your ideas and evidence to readers. These strategies, sometimes called rhetorical modes or techniques, help a writer organize evidence, connect facts into a sequence, and provide clusters of information necessary for conveying a purpose or an argument. You might choose to analyze the cause of an outcome, compare one thing to another, classify your facts into categories, define a key term, describe a person, place, or phenomenon, explain how a process works, or narrate a pertinent event or experience.

Cause and effect

Focusing on causes helps a writer think about why something happened; focusing on effects helps a writer think about what might or could happen. Cause is oriented toward the future; effect looks back to the past.

Compare and contrast

Comparisons look for similarities between things; contrasts look for differences. In most uses of this rhetorical strategy, you will want to consider both similarities and differences—that is, you will want to compare and contrast.

Classify and divide

Classifying and dividing involves either putting things into groups or dividing up a large block into smaller units.

Define

Defining involves telling your reader what something means—and what it does not. It involves saying what something is—and what it is not. As a strategy, defining means making sure you—and your readers—understand what you mean by a key term.

Description

Description uses sensory details to help the reader “see” the event you are writing. When writers describe a person, place, or thing, they indicate what it looks like and often how it feels, smells, sounds, or tastes. As a strategy, describing involves showing rather than telling.

Process

Explains how something is done by sharing in order step by step to complete the process. It can be everyday processes like how to write a letter, how to play basketball, or how to make French fries, or more complex actions like how to change a hard drive.

Narration

Narration may be the most fundamental strategy. We tell stories about ourselves, about our families, and about friends and neighbors. We tell stories to make a point, or to illustrate an argument.

Every Wednesday, as part of my second-year medical student
experience in Rockford, I travel north to see patients at the UIC
University Primary Care Clinic at Rockton. Early this past winter,
I was handed the chart of a new patient and I was told I was seeing
him for “stomachaches.” I closed the door to the sterile white
examination room to face a thin, pale young boy, fourteen years old
and sitting on the exam table with his knees pulled to his chest. His
head jumped as the exam door snapped briskly shut. I introduced
myself and crouched at eye-level next to him. He tightened the grip
on his knees. “What’s wrong?” Silence filled the bleach-tinged air,
and his eyes stared at me, unblinking.

“He’s not eating anything, says his stomach hurts.” The voice
came from the mother in the corner of the room. I hadn’t even
noticed her as I entered, all my attention focused immediately on the
tensed figure on the bed. “For the past two weeks, it’s been nothing
but cereal, and only a handful of that.” I listened to the mother
sketch a history of nausea, stomachaches, and absent stares. It gave
the impression of more than the typical stomachache, and I plied
ahead, waiting to finally ask the key question that slipped the knot
on this mystery and sent the bacteria or virus or swallowed garden
flower culprit plummeting into my lap. The knot refused to give.

“Where did he get the bruises?” I ventured, hoping to unearth
some bleeding disorder with a forgotten manifestation of
gastrointestinal symptoms. The mother looked at the scattered marks
around the red-head’s temples through her friendly librarian glasses,
then up at me.

“He’s very active, normally, and gets into all sorts of spots.
He comes in from the woods with new cuts and scrapes every night.
You should have seen him after the big rains, all mud and torn
jeans.” With this she looked back at the alabaster boy huddling on
the bed and smiled with the memory of his past spirit.

A professor teaching our physical diagnosis class told us we
should know 80 percent of the cases coming before us by hearing the

•

descriptive
details set the
scene and focus
on the patient

• first-person point of view

•
dialogue
provides infor-
mation narrator
did not know

•
Narrator
introduces a
key conflict into
the plot

•

Mother uses
present and
past perfect
tenses to refer
to earlier
actions by her
son; narrator
uses past tense
to describe
mother’s
actions in the
exam room

Jeff Gremmels, “The Clinic”

history alone. This case was quickly proving itself the undesired
20 percent. I moved to the physical exam. The boy was not keen on
the concept of my examining him, and made his desires very clear as
he refused every request to look up at me or to open his clamped
mouth. I wanted to solve this puzzle and began to insist more
forcefully until finally, with his surprisingly strong mother, I
managed to pull his loose shirt over his head. Beneath that shirt lay
pale doughy skin, its spongy texture belying the taut musculature
beneath. On the surface of the skin was a continuation of the light
bruising around his temples. As the mother sat down and the boy
resumed his curled-ball posture, my eyes picked out almost one-dozen
small, red “U”s, with two small bars between the uprights like a
German umlaut. Raised and bright, more like a rash or burn than
a bruise, I hoped these would be the clues I needed to solve my
mystery of the afternoon. Further examination revealed nothing
more than a continuation of the pattern down to his ankles.

I combed my cloudy memories of past lectures for anything
reminiscent of this strange mark as I walked up the hall to find a
doctor. The search failed to exhume any diseases with ties to
Germanic vowels.

As I explained my cryptic findings to the attending physician,
I saw her eyes quickly open, contradicting my belief that she was
actually asleep. Pushing insurance papers towards me, she quickly
stated, “I’m going to look at him. I want you to have the mother fill
these out in the waiting room.” I followed her white lab coat to the
exam room and completed my assigned mission. I returned from
the waiting room—despite the mother’s distant protests of having
already completed the same forms—to find the attending physician
on the phone and admitting my patient directly to hospital care.

Twenty-five minutes later, I again sat in her office, listening to
the diagnosis. “The wheels of a lighter, a disposable lighter, leave
those two umlaut marks—nothing else looks like it. It’s almost
always abuse in his age group.” I couldn’t think of any reply, and we
spent several minutes gazing into the carpet, silent and introspective.

•
Events in
exam room
presented in
chronological
order

•

transitions
increase
suspense, then
lead to climax
of plot

I left the clinic alone and went directly to my apartment, missing
the evening lecture on “Insulin and Diabetic Control.”

Four days later, I went to the hospital to see the boy who was
once my patient. I read the psychiatrist’s chart notes slowly,
rereading the passages describing the boy’s abuse by his stepfather
and his three-year history of self-mutilation and depression. It never
entered my mind, so avid for a solution, to ask for a history of
hospitalizations or illness, and I felt the cavernous shadows of my
own missing knowledge hinting at their depth. My focus had always
been on the disease, the physiologic atrocity accosting the patient’s
unsuspecting organs and cells. This was my first glimpse into an
arena I had utterly neglected—the patient’s psyche—quietly present
in everyone and in every disease.

Entering the boy’s room, I found him asleep, an IV pole
standing sentry over his frail visage. I picked up a crumpled note
from the floor, smoothing it to reveal the young patient’s shaky
handwriting:

I wish I were a paper airplane,
Soaked in gas, shooting red flames,
burning with an orange glow, over
all the people below.
I could fall through the sky
like a comet or a meteorite.
I could become a UFO,
become someone I did not know.

Years of lectures, labs, and research could not match the
education I received in five days with this single boy.

•

More transi-
tions lead to
narrator’s final
understanding
of events

•
Narrator’s main
point in telling
the story

Jeff Gremmels, “The Clinic.” Reprinted by permission of the author.