Rethorical Analysis

Rhetorical Analysis Final Draft

Essay Notes:

This module we’ve been reading, annotating, and analyzing an article on social media. Your exploration of this article will become your essay. You are permitted to quote and paraphrase from the provided article and you write your analysis. However, this is not a research paper, so you will only use the provided article, and NO other sources are permitted. This essay should be about the article only. It is not a personal essay.

Essay Instructions:

In this essay, you will be writing an analysis. The goal of a rhetorical analysis is to explain what is happening in the text, why the author might have chosen to use a particular move or set of rhetorical moves, and how those choices might affect the audience. The text you analyze might be explanatory, although there will be aspects of argument because you must negotiate with what the author is trying to do and what you think the author is doing. One of the elements of doing a rhetorical analysis is looking at a text’s rhetorical situation. The rhetorical situation is the context out of which a text is created.

The question you will answer is: There are several questions you will answer to write your analysis. To answer these questions, you will write a 700-word rhetorical analysis essay. That’s just a bit shy of 3 pages.

Be sure to read the Handout: What is Rhetorical Analysis? and Handout: What is the Rhetorical Situation? 

For this essay, you will analyze the rhetorical strengths and weaknesses of the assigned article.Note: As you cannot possibly cover every aspect and detail of the article in your analysis, use only key claims and ideas and/or representative examples. Yet, with your selections of ideas and examples from the essay, be sure also to give your author a fair shake; don’t skew the author’s argument by presenting more tangential matters. Try to re-create for readers a gist of the argument, but make sure your overview is accurate and fair. Although you’ll need to pretend your readers haven’t before encountered this article as you re-create it for them, you’ll also know that they have actually encountered it; and they are keeping you in check. In this essay, you are less concerned with how you agree or disagree with the author’s claims and position.Instead, you are imagining the author’s intended audience(s); then you are analyzing and evaluating the argument and the author’s rhetorical strategies with the intended audience(s) in mind. The challenge, in part, is to remain as objective as possible in your analysis and evaluation.

Specific requirements/checklist

In your paper, you should include sections addressing each of the following prompts. And while you are free to organize your paper however you see fit (so long as you cover all below sections/prompts), there are some basics strategies you’ll want to adopt. For instance, do begin your essay by first identifying who the author is, what the gist of his or her essay is, where it appeared, and who the intended audience is. And conclude with a final evaluation wherein you weigh the strengths alongside the weaknesses so as to judge the argument’s overall effectiveness for the author’s intended audience. Here are the sections/info you’ll need to include/cover:

1. Identify, analyze, and evaluate the logos appeals by first summarizing the gist of the argument–the author’s main claim(s) and supporting reasons. Make sure to present the author’s position in a fair and reasonable manner; take the author on his or her own terms, remaining objective in your summary of his or her claims and position.
2. Describe and analyze the essay’s structure.Briefly re-create for your readers a sense of the essay’s organization and scope; provide a brief roadmap of how the essay unfolds and how the argument takes shape. For instance, let readers know how the essay opens, what types of examples and stories the author uses, what his or her line of reasoning is, etc.
3. Identify and analyze the author’s intended audience(s). Who most likely comprises the author’s intended audiences? What evidence suggests these audiences? And why does the author target these audiences? (Note: The author may have multiple, very different audiences in mind. If so, then throughout your analysis you’ll need to address the two most opposed audiences.)
4. Identify and analyze the rhetorical situation:What is the exigence surrounding the argument? In what social context does the argument arise? What likely prompted the author to make this argument at this particular time? (Note: You’ll need to minimally research the author and the essay to get a little background information and to learn a little about the original publication source.)
5. Identify, analyze, and evaluate, with examples, the main kinds of argument the author makes. Of the four kinds of argument–definition/existence, cause, evaluation, and position/proposal–which dominate the essay?  Again, because you cannot cover every aspect of the essay–and because it’s very likely that the author uses every kind of argument, and in different ways for different purposes–you’ll want to focus on the key kinds of argument he or she uses, the ones tied to the most central claims. You should cover at least two kinds of argument the author uses, describing what kind it is and why it is central to the overall argument. (Don’t worry too much here. We haven’t gotten into this yet)
6. Identify, analyze, and evaluate, with key examples, representative ethos appeals the author makes. How, for instance, does the author build his or her credibility? How does his or her character contribute to the argument’s persuasiveness to the intended audience?
7. Identify, analyze, and evaluate, with key examples, representative pathos appeals the author makes. How, for instance, does the author appeal to intended readers’ emotions, core values, and identities? What language, stories, images, examples, etc. does the author use to trigger and tap into readers’ emotions, values, and sense of identity?
8. Identify, analyze, and evaluate, with examples, how the author qualifies his or her argument. For instance, what language does the author use to adjust the certainty with which he or she makes his or her main claims? Also, how does the author acknowledge and address the other side? Does he or she concede points to the other side? How so? Does he or she address and refute counter-arguments? How so?
9. Taking your analysis of the above factors into account and weighing side-by-side their relative strengths and weaknesses, assess whether the argument is ultimately persuasive to its intended audiences. Again, it’s unlikely your evaluation will be “all or nothing.”

Remember, this is not a book report. It’s an argument. You may not get all 9 parts but discuss as many as you can.

As you evaluate your chosen essay, remember that you are also writing an argument. Your job in this essay is to convince me and your classmates, using the above criteria, that the author of the essay is successful (or unsuccessful) in his or her deployment of the tools of rhetoric for his or her audience. (But keep in mind that it’s not an “all or nothing” proposition; look for strengths and weaknesses.) You also need to convince me that you yourself have a good understanding of both the essay itself and the rhetorical terms and concepts it uses; establish your ethos, your credibility. Moreover, you’ll need to demonstrate that you have correctly assessed the needs, values, and responses of the author’s likely intended audience(s). Be as convincing as possible!

Essay Requirements

The paper should be 3-4 pages long, typed in a 12-point academic font (Times New Roman is a safe choice), double-spaced, and carefully proofread.  It should adhere to the MLA format shown in your ebook. Though you might refer to outside research you’ve conducted on the author and the publication source, your essay will only rely on one source, your primary one, the article itself. Therefore, all in-text parenthetical citations need to include only the page number from the author’s article–not the full bibliography citation. You will need to include a Works Cited page that includes the reference to your primary source.

Provided Resources for the Essay

• Amedie, Jacob, “The Impact of Social Media on Society” (2015). Advanced Writing: Pop Culture Intersections. 2. http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl_176/2
• The link to this article with your annotations is in Lesson 3.0.2 Prewriting: Annotating Article
• Author Bio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-amedie