Rhetorical Analysis Reflection

One of my assignments last year in English 101 was to write a literacy narrative. This narrative was to explain an event in my life and describing how that event affects the way that I read and write. For this assignment I chose to talk about my experiences with a very close friend who passed away from leukemia at the age of 12. The rhetorical situation in this case had a very significant effect on my writing. I had to go into much more detail describing my story. This is something that I usually share with people via verbal conversation and not something that I had ever wrote about before. It was much more difficult to get all of the emotion across while writing this paper. My audience also effected the rhetorical situation. I am from North Kingstown Rhode Island. In my hometown almost everybody is aware of what happened to Payton Watson (the girl who passed away). However I was writing this paper for a college class in Kentucky. Here, nobody is aware of the story or the significant effect that it had on my life. I was forced to try to convey the deepest feelings of hurt and pain to an audience that was not touched by my situation. I found that the easiest way to do this was not to relate it to my specific encounter instead I related my paper to cancer in general. It is safe to say that almost everybody has been touched by cancer in some way during his or her lifetime. I used this to my advantage while writing and tried my best to play on those shared emotions