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Plan of Action
The problem that Ali and I will be addressing is the lack of student perceived
preparedness in courses that include writing at the college level. We think that this issue could be
due to a lack of transfer from high school teaching to college teaching. Moving forward, we
decided that we wanted to interview students at varying levels in their college education to
discover their experiences and what they perceive their preparedness to be. Our goal with our
rhetorical action to this issue is to raise awareness among educators regarding students
experiences with writing education and preparedness. If there was one rhetorical concept to
consider when choosing how to take action against this issue we have studied, it is the rhetorical
situation that it lies in. One of the first things students learn about rhetoric is that its effectiveness
depends on the context it functions within. Rhetors make intentional choices based off of that
context. Ali and I have seriously considered how best our message could be effective given the
situation.
Ali and I think the most effective way to raise awareness among educators about our
problem is by providing them with direct access to student testimonials about their writing
experience and preparedness. We have decided to acquire access to these testimonials through an
interviewing process. We have a linear plan for interviewing students: first, Ali and I have
created the questions necessary to best understand student experience with their writing
education, including questions like what did you know about writing before you entered
college? and how do you feel about your overall writing ability? Ali will be interviewing
students at various levels of their college education who have taken first-year composition at
UCF or are taking it currently. I will be interviewing students at varying levels who have not

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taken it or freshman who are not currently in it. After completing enough interviews, we hope to
have a well-rounded collection of information about students experiences.
We want to take the information we find from the interviews and put it into a medium of
communication to give to our audience. We have chosen a video to be our medium. We will
video tape the live conversation that ensues during the interviewing process. In addition to the
video content we have acquired of student testimonials, we will also video tape ourselves
presenting the questions asked during the interviews and discussing the context of the problem,
including some rhetorical points about the issue. These moments of Ali and I narrating will
provide the organization of the video in order to clearly make our point. The final step in this
process will be to comprise the best segments of the recorded interviews, combined with our
narrations, into a complete, organized video that we wish to be the fully-developed rhetorical
action addressing this problem.
During this semester, we are able to provide a sample of action, which will be a video
that is similar to what we just described. It will be a shorter, simpler version of the ideal video,
where we interview around five students and organize excerpts of their interviews into the
sample video. We will not narrate the video ourselves for our sample of action; instead, interview
questions will be displayed through text on the screen. We want our sample of action to reflect
what our fully developed video would look like, and we want to provide some examples of
student testimonials about their writing experiences.
Our final, full-developed video will then be sent to educators in the Central Florida area.
Ali and I decided for our audience to be educators because we wanted to address the audience
who has the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will

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be recognized or heeded by others in ones community (Palczewski, Ice, Fritch 187). In this
case, teachers have the direct ability to address the rhetorical issue of student preparedness with
writing. They are able to alter teaching methods, even if it is in minute ways, in order to reach
their students with the skills necessary to be prepared, adaptable, and original writers. We want to
take the first step of reaching teachers, because we think that their understanding of student
struggles is crucial for them to have an influence.
Ali and I have to consider how we will actually get our fully-developed video in front of
our audience and in a situation where they would be inclined to pay attention to it. We know that
high school teachers are required to go through training courses every so often in order to be up
to date about educational methods. Ali and I would approach school administrators to explain our
video and its purpose and ask if the video could be included in a required training course. We
think that if our video is presented in a setting in which teachers are already being asked to grow
in their educational methods, they will really take what the video is communicating into account.
Also, since this plan is based on if we have significant time and resources, we think it
would be beneficial for administrators to actually view the video as well, not just promote
teachers to view it. Administrators and legislators are important to reach because they make the
rules and standards that high school teachers have to meet. Ali and my research showed that high
school teachers had to face limitations like requirements from the school board to prepare
students to be able to write five paragraph essays and conform to standardized test rules (Wardle
3-4). Therefore, in the long run, reaching administrators and legislators, the ones calling the
major shots, is going to alter the deficiencies that students face in their writing education. Karlyn
Kohrs Campbell, who is discussed in our textbook, argues that in some cases, rhetors may need
to construct audiences as agents of action (Palczewski, Ice, Fritch, 188). If we could raise

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awareness about student struggles to the legislators and administrators who enforce
requirements, Ali and I could start the process of constructing them as an agent of action.
Along with promoting agency among teachers and administrators, a major rhetorical
agent in this issue that we want to give a voice to is the students. This is another reason why we
are choosing to use a video as the medium for getting our message across, because it provides
students with an avenue for directly expressing their concerns. Students deserve a voice, to be a
part of advocating for the quality of their education. Ali and I discussed how students shouldnt
have to jump through any hoops to express their concerns about how they learn, how successful
their experiences have been, and if they feel prepared for the future. An audience able to help
should be readily available.
Teachers are the natural choice for that audience. Most teachers are very concerned with
feedback from their students and are even more concerned with their students success. Ali and I
decided to use the positive constraint of the caring attitude that most teachers already possess.
We didnt have to persuade our audience to care; we are just raising awareness about issues that
they already care about. We chose this medium because the immediacy of visualizing students
appeals to that care more than another medium would.
Furthermore, we chose to consider the method that teachers usually prefer their students
to address them through, which is usually just the direct communication of their questions and
concerns, face-to-face. Ali and I wanted to replicate that face-to-face method as best we could for
our action to be the most rhetorically effective, based off of the context of our rhetoric. That
context is an informal relationship between teacher and student. Indeed, teachers are
professionals; they have standards and responsibilities to meet. However, the intimacy and

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mentor-mentee quality between teacher and student is informal. Ali and I want to support that
ease of communication.
We also considered the qualities of visual rhetoric to be highly beneficial for our purpose.
Visual rhetoric is becoming very popular in society today. It is a convenient and captivating way
to quickly send out messages to large groups of people. We wanted the appeals to emotion and
logic in our audience to grab them in a way that student testimonials in written form cannot. We
wanted our rhetorical approach to be visual rhetoric because it is engaging, immediate, and
impactful. What causes this impactful quality is due to the fact that visuals possess the
characteristic of presence because of their immediacy, the creation of something in front of an
audiences consciousness (Palczewski, Ice, Fritch 62). Considering that a teacher cares about
students, that the whole reason that they have chosen their profession is to equip students to be
successful, we could assume that our audiences consciousness is already geared toward
absorbing the content that we are to present in this video.
All in all, the lack of writing transfer from high school to college level writing is a
complex issue. Its not something that Ali and I are trying to solve with our plan of action.
However, we feel that we can still take steps to bring awareness to the issue and make a
considerable contribution to the cause. Before we can solve the problem, people must know
about it, and thats something that Ali and I can be part of. Eventually, the study of writing
transfer may lead to a change in curriculum for student writing education, particularly at the high
school level. For now, as long as students have the opportunity to say what they want to say, and
teachers have a way to hear that message, then there can still be real change and we can find
success in making an impact.

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Works Cited
Wardle, Elizabeth. Easing the Transitions: Finding Ways to Work in Solidarity Across the High
School/College Divide. Crosspol: A Journal of Transitions for High School + College
Writing Teachers 1.1 (2014): 2-8.
Palczewski, Ice, Fritch. Rhetoric in Civic Life. State College: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2012.
Print.
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