D#8, HW#3, Chapter 7

1. What is my rhetorical situation:

• What are the effects of stress on students and what are some positive and negative ways students can cope with stress?
• I want to know if students under a lot of stress can lead to violence, such as the Virginia Tech massacre, or suicide. I also want to know if these things can be avoided by finding or helping people find positive ways to handle stress.
• The audience I am addressing in this paper is my professor and also my classmates.
• I chose this topic for a couple of different reasons. I am a student and I am experiencing the stress from classwork first hand. Also I am a parent and have seen the effects of school stress on my own children.

2. Responding to my research question:

1. Due to stress students can commit acts of violence towards themselves or others.
2. Stress alone cannot be the cause of violent acts.
3. Even if someone, such as the students parents, would have seen the stress their child was under these situations could not have been avoided.
4. If a parent, teacher, or councilor would have been aware of the stress these students were under these massacres could have been avoided.

Answer 3 would seem the most unlikely from the research I have conducted, while it may not be stress alone that causes the school massacres if someone would have noticed how these students were feeling I think school massacres could have been avoided.

Answer 4 seems the most likely answer from the research I have found. There are always positive ways of coping with stress and these students just went unnoticed for to long and could not deal with their situations any longer. I also think given my audience is also students this answer would be the most likely one as most students have had to deal with stress sometime in their lives.

3. Developing a thesis:

• What are the effects of stress on students and what are some positive and negative ways students can cope with stress?
• While stress may not be the only factor it was a major factor in recent and past school massacres.
• People need to recognize the signs of stress to be able to avoid future massacres.
• Learning these signs can help not only yourself but others get the help they may need.
• Learning positive ways of coping with stress can also help people handle their situation.
  

• Most students have had to deal with stress while they attended school, everyone should learn to recognize the signs of someone being overstressed because there are positive and negative ways to cope with stress and if someone choses a negative path the results can be devastating.

4. Understanding my warrants:

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes. I think so because we are mostly all students and have felt the stress of deadlines and such due to school.

5. Developing Rebuttals

The main rebuttal I can think of on this paper is, and this has been asked by some of my classmates, can stress really be a main cause of these school massacres? Like I said I do not believe it to be the only cause I do think it ranks high on the list.