Welcome to my online portfolio!

My name is Julia Realmuto and I am a senior at Elon University majoring in English with a concentration in Professional Writing and Rhetoric.

Throughout this portfolio you will encounter projects and writing assignments that have all been created during my undergraduate career at Elon. They range from my personal interests such as a cookbook, to my professional experiences regarding past and potential internships. Even with such a range of documents I draw various rhetorical connections to different aspects of each assignment.

While compiling this portfolio I had the opportunity to gain a better understanding of my professional writing and rhetoric identity. Over the years, I have discovered It can be a very frustrating process attempting to explain to other people that there is no one definition for rhetoric and that rhetoric is not only a negative term as often portrayed in political arenas. However, in my opinion, I would define rhetoric as: the process by which using language to communicate and effectively persuade an audience or individual while appealing to the ethos (character), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic).

Rhetoric informs the study and practice of writing because oftentimes, either in the workplace or personal contexts, one might have to persuade and successfully communicate with others using specific language and rhetorical tools. For example, every day advertisers are seeking to bring in new business. However, the company needs to be able to demonstrate and communicate to their audience (the company needing an advertising company) either through a power point presentation, verbal pitch, or memo why they deserve their business. By having a depth of knowledge about professional writing and rhetoric the company can incorporate visual aids that are functionally mapped, target the audience specifically, organize the presentation information strategically, deliver the presentation/memo with conviction, and stylize the language based upon the intended goal or outcome perhaps even using some key words associated with the target company.

Over the course of my professional writing and rhetoric career I have been able to identify four rhetorical strategies that I find to be most powerful and valuable, since they have been applied to my own writing experiences. The four rhetorical strategies which I previously mentioned are as follows: Aristotle’s 5 Cannons, Kenneth Burke’s Pentad, neo-Aristotelian Rhetoric of Persuasion, and personal authority. 

I have put a great deal of time and effort into this portfolio and hope that it is reflected as you are reading it. If you ask Burke, rhetoric is echoed in every aspect of life while I am not sure I can stretch quite that far I am most definitely able to identify the importance and crucial applications of rhetoric in both the workplace and personal life.