Problem
In this writing, you will demonstrate your genre, audience, and lexis awareness by making choices to shape various texts to reflect these concepts. While you will be provided with one specific scenario, you will need to respond to several indIvidual rhetorical situations created by this scenario, composing each required text to a specific audience, following the conventions of a specific genre, and including appropriate language for that audience and that genre. Please, label each Rhetorical Situation clearly with a subheading, and compose your response to it beneath the subheading. The last subheading will be "Mini-Reflection," explained at the end of this prompt.
Here is the scenario:
To say that today was one of the most disappointing and stressful days of your life would be an understatement of great proportions. The assignment you submitted in your English class has been flagged as plagiarized, and rightfully so. You did copy significant chunks of the writing from a website, just to quickly submit something and not get a zero because you procrastinated and then your roommate talked you into going to the beach for the whole weekend. You have been notified by your English professor that he was reporting you to the Academic Honesty Committee, and chances are that you will be suspended for this infraction. Your basketball scholarship depends on your grades, so now you are really worried.
Rhetorical Situation
As part of your plagiarism awareness training class, you are now enrolled in after your paper was identified as plagiarized, you must write an essay, supported by sources from the library's databases, on the topic of academic dishonesty and its prevalence as well as its consequences in the academic and the professional field. Write a comprehensive introduction to this essay, complete with the thesis statement in which you make an explicit point about plagiarism, citing at least one peer-reviewed academic source from the databases and including all sources on the Works Cited page. As you compose this introduction, keep in mind the conventions of this type of writing, the audience's expectations, and the details expected in and relevant to an introduction.
Mini-Reflection on Genre, Audience, and Lexis:
Reflect on the experience of writing in different genres and for different audiences in each rhetorical situation. Use the following prompts as a guideline (3 and 5 are mandatory):
A. How did you know what was appropriate for each genre?
B. For each scenario, how did your audience impact what and how you chose to say?
C. Compare any two scenarios and discuss the significant differences in rhetorical situation (discuss purpose, audience, intended outcome, and appropriateness of writing style and lexis for each).
D. How does your understanding of genre, audience, lexis, and rhetorical situation influence the choices you make in writing?
E. What aspects of this assignment can you apply to writing assignments you are currently working on in any other classes? In other words, what did you learn by completing this assignment that you can now transfer to another writing situation?