First Blog ( Pages 3-15 )

Response to "Your Writing Experiences" on page 10, question 1

The last time I felt compelled to write to someone was when my boyfriend left for West Point Military Academy boot camp this summer. The only way I was able to communicate with him was by writing a simple letter and sending it by mail, like the old days. In every letter, I had to be careful about what I wrote. If I wrote anything in the letter about us that would embarrass him and the upperclassmen read it, then he would get hazed or have to do push-ups. In this letter, I wrote about how much I missed him and about anything that I could think of at the time that I wrote it. My letter rambled on about my daily grind and about how boring Cary, North Carolina was. I felt really bad after sending him that part of the letter because I knew he was going through much worse and here I was complaining about the little things. I basically filled him in on everything since he left. I told him about all the gossip, how his family invited me over for dinner already and about how proud I was of him doing what he was doing.
As I look back on this letter and from what I learned in class, I am able to identify some elements from pages three to fifteen. In this letter or rhetorical situation, I am the rhetor or the writer. The audience was my boyfriend and possibly the upperclassmen. The context was West Point Military Academy. The exigence was the fact that I wanted to communicate with him. I resolved this exigence by sending him a letter because that was the only possible way of communication.