be sure you are familiar with the genre you will be writing

so your decisions must be part of an ongoing writing process that involves planning, drafting, revising, getting feedback, and repeating these stages until you are confident your document is effective.

other components that build the frame of your document.

Those readers are the initial recipients of the message.  But there are secondary and tertiary readers to be aware of, too.

Ultimately, if the writer follows out the logic of her purpose with the right kinds of evidence, reasoning, genre, and tone, the text will carry weight because the message is clear.

So, my purpose became to alert the company leaders to a significant problem.

we go through a process of inquiry to find out what we want to have happen, in other words, to clarify our purpose.

audience because an audience affects our purpose

Because the humor (directed to one reader) suggests the problem is not a serious one (to another reader).

our purpose needs to be clear in our own minds and in the minds of our readers.

Discovering exigence is similar to narrowing a subject to a topic

Think of it this way: exigence and kairos are the fuel that drives our rhetorical choices forward.

kairos

Your topic, by necessity, fills the gap: it satisfies your exigence. From that point on, you can assess your rhetorical situation.

your purpose (to share good news); your audience (your best friend); your document (a text that conforms to the conventions of text-messaging, including an emoji); the social context (you and your best friend always share good news with each other before anyone else).

Exigence, simply defined, means that we are pressed to speak or write.

Other approaches put more responsibility on producers by requiring them to take back their products for disposal, cover recycling costs and design and produce goods that are easy to recycle effectively.

This isn’t surprising, since the current U.S. recycling system puts the onus on consumers to separate recyclable materials and keep contaminants out of the bin.

More than three out of four participants (78%) ordered the strategies incorrectly.

The familiar waste management hierarchy urges people to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” in that order.

New research suggests that even when plastic does get recycled, it produces staggering amounts of microplastic pollution.

overlook waste reduction and reuse in favor of recycling. We call this tendency recycling bias and reduction neglect.

most paper coffee cups are made with a thin plastic lining, which makes separating these materials and recycling them difficult.

My own lab studies show very minimal microplastic release, and a 2024 study found that the release of microplastics from recycled plastic-asphalt was estimated to be a thousand times less than the release of rubber particles from worn tires.

Scaling up production requires a consistent supply of clean, sorted plastic, which not all cities have the infrastructure to provide. Some types of plastic can’t be safely melted or may release harmful fumes if not processed correctly.

27 million tons of plastic, making up 18.5% of all municipal solid waste nationwide.

Plastic road replaces bitumen, an already petroleum-based ingredient in the road, with waste

showed no visible signs of distress or cracks, whereas many roads in Bangladesh had visible cracks and distress during the same period.

We first clean the plastic, then shred it into small flakes. Finally, we mix it into the asphalt at high temperatures.

In my research team’s process, we replace a small part of that bitumen – about 8% to 10% – with melted plastic from everyday items, such single-use plastic bags and plastic bottles. For our plastic road construction project near Dallas, we used 4.5 tons of plastic waste for nearly a mile of a one-lane road.

living closest to the piles of waste were often sick, while those farther away were healthier.

we have constructed a one-mile section of plastic-infused road in Rockwall

The result is a stronger road that lasts longer and keeps some used plastic out of the environment.

Globally, more than 400 million tons of plastic are produced each year, and less than 10% is recycled.

As a civil engineer,

Dr. Sahadat Hossain is a Professor of Civil Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Hossain has completed his B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, India, Master of Engineering in Geotechnical Engineering from Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, Thailand, and Ph.D. from North Carolina State University (NCSU) at Raleigh, NC, USA.

work experience in the design, instrumentation, construction and performance monitoring of excavation support system design for building foundations, cut and cover tunnel for the underpass, retaining walls, walls, and temporary and permanent excavation support system for transportation related projects.

Dr. Hossain and his research team investigated the feasibility of using Recycled Plastic Pins

At present Dr. Hossain is working on research, development and implementation of innovative solutions for sustainable waste management and to provide support for waste management in USA and developing countries

Lateral reading

double-entry notes

re-reading. This time we read with a more analytical eye

participatory stage

Introductory reading

Active reading creates neuronal pathways in our brains necessary for thinking and writing in that discourse.

first, it will help you understand the nature and nuances of the problem; and second, it will help you understand how to enter the conversation and contribute to its solution. In this way, active reading is not simply reading for information—it’s reading to learn how to think in a particular discourse about a particular problem.

discursive

Active reading is the practice and skill of making meaning through deep engagement with a text or other composition, using the basic techniques of re-reading, annotating, responding, and sharing.

(academic, professional, and public)

Indeed, addressing complex problems often requires thinking about and writing for a range of stakeholders, including those from within a particular academic or professional community but also extending beyond those communities to the general public:

Framing “is the process whereby communicators act… to construct a particular point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be viewed in a particular manner, with some facts made more or less noticeable (even ignored) than others…. Frames are central organizing ideas within a narrative account of an issue or event; they provide the interpretive cues for otherwise neutral facts”

In order to garner my support, someone—some rhetorically effective researcher and writer—would need to describe and explain the other, less obvious, ways I might be affected by so many accidents.   My tax burden, or the absence of ambulances on my side of town, or the lingering communal effects of so much grief and anxiety.

There are 300 car accidents a day within the city limits in which people’s injuries require trips to the emergency room” emphasizes “injury,” and “emergency,” which we all know, by definition, indicate problems.

Writers who are determined to contribute knowledge toward the greater good by engaging in problems that matter have not only the responsibility but the freedom to decide which gap or which perspective or which data-set deserves another round of questions.

A quick online search for “taxonomy of problems” reveals that people from many fields (such as education, psychology, and business, just to name a few) have organized types of problems.

wicked problems