ENC 2135 Instructor: Laura Biagi

Name: _____Tristan Hale_____

First Draft, aka the Brainstorm/Outline for Project 3

Instructions: To complete the first draft, please fill out the below Brainstorm/Outline document.
Because this project is unusual and because you will be sharing it in class with your peers, it is a
combination of a brainstorm/outline plan and initial work on your genre compositions and
rhetorical rationale. Everyone should complete this version for the first draft. There is a lot to do
for Project 3, so completing this should give you a good running start!

Step 1. Identify the pressing issue you are focusing on within your chosen major/field.
*Your chosen major/field should be from Project 1 or Project 2, unless you have my
permission to use another.

I would like to continue to discuss the topic of my second project: the battle to protect the
privacy of citizens through continued access to strong encryption.

Step 2. Identify and describe the 2 specific and unique audiences you are planning to persuade
regarding your pressing issue by filling out the below for each. (Some notes and reminders are
included below as well.)

Audience 1: a more academic audience, specifically one in the tech industry which may already
have some interaction with encryption but not know the extent to which losing this right would
be a catastrophe

What action are you persuading this audience to take regarding your pressing issue? (For
example, to hire more diverse employees? to apply to jobs they’ve been historically
underrepresented in? to learn more about the issue? to recycle more? etc.)
**Keep in mind that you’ll ideally want to zero in on the best targetable audience
for the action you’re trying to persuade them of. For example, if you want to
encourage more women to go into engineering, targeting high school girls and/or
college freshmen and sophomore women is a good idea, rather than those who
have already earned an engineering degree, as by that stage there are likely
already too few women who have earned engineering degrees.
**Also keep in mind that you need specific and unique audiences. High school
girls and young college women are two different audiences. So are young college
women and young college women majoring in STEM fields. “People interested in
__ field” is not specific enough of an audience; however, college students
interested in __ field and recent STEM graduates interested in __ field are two
separate and unique audiences that could work—but they would likely require
two different strategies in appealing to them. Zero in on specific audiences as
much as possible.

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 I aim to raise awareness of this issue, and to persuade readers that they should take
actions to protect their privacy in the event that a government or other authority tries to
take that right away from them.

Audience 2: a less academic audience, specifically young adults and high school students, who
are at an age where they are not only technologically literate but have an invested interest in their
privacy and safety, and may need to be made aware of this pressing issue

What action are you persuading this audience to take regarding your pressing issue?

Much like the goal of my academic audience, I would like to raise awareness of this topic, and in
this case also educate the audience on what strong encryption is and why it is important. I would
like to persuade them to also protect those rights, and to warn others of the dangers of losing
your right to privacy.

Step 3. Identify and describe the 3 genre compositions you plan to use. Include which audience
they are for and a brief rationale.
*Remember that eventually you’ll need to have at least 500 words spread across your 3
genre compositions. Not all need to be text-based, but at least one will need to be, or you’ll want
enough words spread across all 3 to add up to 500.

Genre Composition 1: I plan to compose a short scholarly article, outlining the risks and the
slippery slope that comes with quantifying and outlawing strong encryption

Which audience (of your 2 audiences) will it be for?

The academic audience.

Include a 1-2 sentence or so brief rationale, considering the rhetorical choices you will be
making within this genre and how these will be effective for your purpose, audience, and
context. It’s a good idea to refer to our Google Doc of Rhetorical Analysis Terms.

In this composition I will mostly be focusing on logos and pathos. Given the audience, I
think appealing to ethos would be largely ineffective as the audience is likely to have
more knowledge and experience than myself. As such, I will focus on creating a logical
argument as well as appealing to emotion.

Genre Composition 2: I plan to compose a PSA in the form of an advice column, much like one
that may appear in a high school or college newsletter

Which audience will it be for? The young audience

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 Include a 1-2 sentence or so brief rationale.
An advice column should be much more accessible to a young audience, and this
composition will contain very informal language and explanations. I will mostly be
making use of pathos, as young adults and high school students are much more likely to
care about an issue if it affects them personally. I will also primarily be composing in a
light/casual tone, which will increase in seriousness with the topic.

Genre Composition 3: Newspaper opinion piece

Which audience will it be for? The young audience

Include a 1-2 sentence or so brief rationale.

While the use of a newspaper opinion piece to target a young audience may seem
counterintuitive, the increase in the prevalence of digital newspapers makes the news
much more accessible. Additionally, parts of the younger audience who use very little
technology to the point where they may read physical newspapers would be a very
important audience to target, as they are the least likely to be educated on the topic of
strong encryption and the risks associated with its potential restriction.

Step 4. Begin working on one of your genre compositions. Complete as much of a full draft of
it as you can and include it here. If it’s text-based, include the text below. If it’s something like a
podcast or an interview, include a complete draft of the script or the questions you’ll ask and
who you’ll interview plus how you’ll introduce the interview (it’s a good idea to go ahead and
schedule the interview—there’s not much time before the full draft is due!). If it’s a meme or
other image-based project, copy and paste it here or include screenshots of it. If it’s a social
media account, include a link that your peers could access while in class and/or screenshots.
*Remember that eventually you’ll need to have at least 500 words spread across your 3
genre compositions.

Scholarly article:
Strong encryption is an ever-present facet of daily life. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be able
to securely use your credit card to make purchases, or even safely view medical records on your
personal computer. But what classifies strong encryption? According to Law Insider, an online
legal dictionary, strong encryption is defined as “encryption technologies…whose strength
provides reasonable assurance that it will protect the encrypted information from unauthorized
access and is adequate to protect the confidentiality and privacy of the encrypted information…”.
While the definition does discuss some specifics such as minimum key lengths in symmetric vs
asymmetric encryption, the plethora of vague descriptors such as “reasonable assurance” are
extremely concerning. If such unspecific language is used in a legal definition, it is very
reasonable to assume that a ban on strong encryption could have extremely far-reaching
consequences, potentially stripping personal privacy on an unprecedented level. While it would
be easier than ever for criminals to steal personal information, ordinary citizens would be
completely unprotected from any unwanted observation.

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Step 5. Begin your rhetorical rationale for the above genre composition draft you’ve created.
Write at least 150 words (remember that you’ll eventually need 1000 words in your rhetorical
rationale discussing all three genre compositions). This can be a rough first draft of your
rationale, or it can be a detailed outline of the rhetorical choices you’ll be discussing (it should be
more detailed than what you wrote in Step 3 for the genre composition). As mentioned above,
you’ll want to analyze the rhetorical choices you’ve made and how these are effective for your
purpose, audience, and context (refer to our Google Doc of Rhetorical Analysis Terms).

I begin the scholarly article composition with a short hook to get the reader’s attention.
While this is a scholarly article, I still want to establish the necessity of strong encryption
immediately in order to quell any future doubt before they materialize. Immediately, given my
plan to rely on logos in this composition, I want to explicitly define strong encryption. This
ensures that the audience will not be averse to any logical arguments on the basis of confusion
about the terminology or simply a lack of knowledge. Now that all of this background has been
established, we can use logos to form an argument. Given the undeniable fact presented in the
beginning of the article in the form of the legal definition of strong encryption, any
extrapolations are easily supported. For example, the sourced definition makes use of terms such
as “reasonable assurance”. This choice of words is incredibly vague, and logically could be
interpreted in any variety of capacities by both readers and lawmakers. As such, it is easy for the
audience to see the connection to a potential severe breach of privacy if strong encryption is ever
banned. Given the wording constraints in such a short scholarly article, I don’t have much room
for any other arguments, but I still want to make an use of pathos before closing the article.
When someone finishes reading a composition, the emotions they felt are what they remember
much more than a logical argument no matter how promising it may be. In an appeal to pathos, I
remind the audience that while a loss of strong encryption would have disastrous consequences
for the general public, it would not change the actions of criminals whatsoever. If the
government takes control of strong encryption, then criminals would simply continue to do what
they do. However, if they ban strong encryption entirely from public use, then it would be child’s
play for any criminals to gain access to a vast amount of personal information from average
citizens and the people would be powerless to stop it.

Works Cited

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Strong Encryption Definition. (n.d.). Retrieved March 23, 2021, from
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/strong-encryption