Content and Background:

This was an assignment that served purposes for two different Professional Writing and Rhetoric classes: Grant Writing for Nonprofits and Writing as Inquiry. The assignment was to write a first grant for any nonprofit or cause we wanted to get money for to test our grant writing abilities. I chose the Highway 64 Project: a travel writing initiative that I was completing in Writing as Inquiry. The purpose of the trip was to immerse students into the North Carolina culture while travelling throughout the state. The students then wrote blog posts about the different places they visited. The grant itself asked for money for lodging, gas, and potentially food for the students to use while they were travelling. The grant includes both a preliminary and potential budget. In combination with another groups’ grant, ideas from this grant were incorporated and actually received most of the funding we asked for.

 

Rhetorical Decisions:

The way I began to tackle this grant was, by first, putting myself in the grant funder’s (The Fund for Excellence’s) shoes. There is no way that the Fund for Excellence is going to want to give their money to a student activity that achieves almost nothing, rather than a nonprofit that will, in the long run, accomplish much more, I thought. This is when the invention canon came into play, and furthermore helped me immensely with the struggles of being a first-time grant writer. Invention is defined as the “discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one’s cause” (Cicero). I first started with a simple stream of consciousness write up: I internally asked questions such as: What is the Fund for Excellence’s main goals? How can I make the goals of the Highway 64 Project align with these goals? What questions may they have, and how can I answer those questions before the funder even asks them? Although, at first, I thought nothing would come of it, I was surprised to realize that some of my overarching arguments came from my initial freewrite.

 

Based upon my free write, I decided to start the grant with a long-winded narrative that made appeals to pathos by describing our generational divide with the natural world (in this case, North Carolina) and how the “Elon bubble” could benefit from some exposure to travel. After explaining the project’s details, I take a moment to reflect upon how the project will increase students’ utilization of their major by describing how the students will become better writers as a whole, the ultimate goal for Professional Writing and Rhetoric majors. The grant encompasses multiple appeals to ethos (the students’ character) pathos (the need to travel to for educational purposes and to furthermore benefit the community ) and logos (the logistics, budget, and statistics mentioned).

 

 

Conclusion:

Although this was an assignment merely assigned to test out my skills (but was later successful), I believe I utilized my knowledge of rhetoric more than I have ever before within a piece of writing. This is one of the first modes of writing I have actually done with a formal invention process. By doing so, I was able to envision all forms of an argument and chose which appeals and in which order be the best fit for my piece. Because of the invention process, I was also equipped to utilize multiple rhetorical appeals when molding my argument.  While reflecting at the end of this semester, I’ve decided that this is a piece that exhibits how far I have come from beginning my PWR major less than a year ago.