What are the 3 most important concepts in composition would you say? These concepts might play a role in your teaching philosophy, so you might think of this question as what are the three most important beliefs about your own teaching do you have?

I believe raising students’ awareness to the value of the addressee/audience comes first in importance. Second to that, come the message form and finally the content of the message. I tend to think that because of the nature of communication today, a writer from any stand point should pay special attention to his/her audience. Communication nowadays is no longer unilateral. On the contrary, it involves more than one speaker and more than one addressee, and even a message is loaded with “infinite” sub-messages, so to speak. In the advertisement field for example, professionals not only seek to raise consumer’s interest in a given product, they create the desire. To accomplish such thing, one has to know how to address the target population (that is almost every body and anybody). For this reason, I would like to stress the importance of knowing where one is heading to in order to know how to say it. Here comes the importance of the form syntactically and semantically. A single idea can de delivered in an endless number of ways and an endless number of effects will follow up from this to end up with reactions. Speaking of reactions, I would like to stress the importance of watching one’s mouth/pen before letting go. My mother calls almost every other day to check up that I have not caught up the swine flu because she watches the news. My father was once worried sick about me because he watched the news about hurricanes. I used to think Iraq is such a boring place to be at before I attended a presentation given by an Iraqi national about how green the country is. So far, so good but the day when messages start propaganda for naturally bad things such as war or marijuana, etc, I think Mankind will be in really big trouble. Thus, from my humble stand point of a potential rhetorician, I believe, audience awareness, form and message are very important in uplifting students’ writing quality.

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