For this second essay, you will learn about and practice various ways in which we might rhetorically analyze arguments. We will develop our critical reading and analytical practices by engaging, researching, examining, discussing, summarizing, and writing about various readings on our shared course topic of inquiry, “Politics of Language.”
For this 1- to 2-page essay, you will examine the rhetorical features of one class text by “becoming” the author of that text and offering a firsthand account explaining why, exactly, you made the choices you did in your piece. You will summarize the rhetorical features of your text as if you were the author giving insight to your readers.
WHAT. The aim of your rhetorical analysis is to share with your intended audience your interpretation of the text’s important rhetorical features. In other words, rather than focusing your attention on critiquing and evaluating the text, your task is to examine how the text is rhetorically designed in order to appeal to its intended audience. You will, of course, need to contextualize and summarize the text; however, you’ll focus mostly on analyzing what the text is doing, and why.
HOW. You’ll assert your interpretation (thesis) by embodying the author and describing the choices you, the author, have made in order to affect the audience, which you will explicitly identify. You’ll use examples and short quotations from “your” text and explain why you chose to write this piece in that way.
Cover Letter: Your analysis should be preceded by a cover letter when you submit the final version. Refer to the cover letter assignment sheet in our course materials.
Breakdown of Assignment Goals
1. Audience. You have five choices for what audience you’ll tailor your rhetorical analysis to: 1) your classmates and instructor; 2) some of your friends or family; 3) readers who are experts of or are interested in rhetoric and argumentation; 4) a popular audience who may not be aware of rhetoric, its functions, and affordances. Your purpose, argument, and evidence should be tailored to appeal to your audience. And, part of meeting any audience’s expectations is to draft and edit your essay so that your content, style, tone, and sentences are carefully edited and appropriate for the audience.
2. Thesis and progression of main points. Aim to make your essay carefully narrowed, organized, and transitioned. Your thesis should be specific, highlighting just 1 to 2 rhetorical features that are central to the construction of the argument or particularly significant or interesting. The organization of your argument and analysis should be crafted in a way that your ideas are delivered to your audience in a “digestible” fashion.
Throughout the paper, please use “signposts,” transitional phrases, and topic sentences to guide readers and let them know what is about to happen. For example, “In what follows, I will explain…” or “Another feature from the text worth pointing out is…” “While I have been examining X, Y represents an alternative approach to…”
3. Rhetorical Situation and Summary. You will introduce yourself as the author and provide appropriate rhetorical information about yourself and your text (including the genre, publication, and year published), and its context (including the general topic and exigence), purpose, and audience.
4. Rhetorical Analysis. This is the main goal of the essay. Select appropriate rhetorical concepts/terms your analysis will focus on and then carefully select evidence (quotes and examples) you’ll use from the text(s) to support your analysis. You’ll want to be very choosy in selecting representative examples that demonstrate your ideas. It also means that you’ll need to be extensive in your analysis of those select examples, providing appropriate description and interpretation to show your audience what you, the author, did.
5. Exigence. Comment on how, why, and for whom this text, and your rhetorical analysis of it, is significant to us now. What difference might this text make to readers? What’s at stake? For whom? Who might be implicated or affected? How might rhetorical analysis be important to readers? How might your specific interpretations be valuable? You may also discuss how this text or assignment affected you; about the significance of this article in the context of our current social/political atmosphere; and/or about the rhetorical effectiveness of the text.
Assessment Rubric for the Rhetorical Analysis Essay
| 1. Anticipate the assumptions of and appropriately reach the intended audience. How effectively does the rhetorical analysis tailor its argument, examples, and language to meet the expectations of the intended audience? |
| 2. Guide readers to understand the thesis and progression of main points. How effectively is the essay narrowed, organized, and transitioned? How effective and specific is the thesis? |
| 3. Introduce the rhetorical situation and summarize the text. How effectively are elements of the rhetorical situation introduced (i.e., information about the author, text, context/exigence, purpose, and audience)? How effective are the summary of the text’s argument, evidence, and organization? |
| 4. Rhetorically analyze the text. How effectively does the essay rhetorically analyze the text by applying 1 to 2 specific rhetorical concepts? How effectively is the analysis supported with evidence? |
| 5. Demonstrate Exigence. How effectively does the essay answer the So what? Who cares? questions to demonstrate the exigence of rhetorical analysis and to make connections to larger implications? |
| 6. General Requirements. Were all requirements for length and due date met? |
