Essay 2

Rhetorical Analysis

Length: about 4 pages (approximately 1,000-1,250 words)

Value: 125 points

Assignment: Choose one of the texts written in Acting Out Culture and write a rhetorical analysis that examines its content, purpose, and effectiveness. As Chapter 14 of Invention and Craft explains, “a rhetorical analysis characterizes various elements of a composition and the manner in which they work together to convey the author’s purpose to his or her audience” (226). Your purpose, then, is to show us how the author uses the various elements of the rhetorical situation to achieve a particular communicative goal – to inform, analyze, persuade, convince, or entertain.

To analyze effectively, you need a clearly defined interpretive lens. In this case the lens is composed of the elements of the rhetorical situation. Chapter 3 of Invention and Craft identifies and defines several elements of the rhetorical situation. However, below are some the elements you will need to use for this assignment:

Issue – a matter about which there is dispute.
Writer(s) – author(s), text-maker(s).
Audience – readers, receptors.
Medium – text: a book, an article, newspaper, magazine, web page, visual or audio text.
Opposing View – a view that contrasts with that of the writer’s.
Exigence – an imperfection marked by urgency; a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done; a thing which is other than it should be; the thing the writer is trying to fix.
Constraints – limitations. Made up of persons, events, objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence.
Style – sentence design and word choice.
Artistic appeals:

ethos (credibility),
pathos(emotion),
logos (reasoning).

You obviously cannot address all of these elements in one brief paper. Instead, you will need to select at least four of them (each bullet point counts as one). You will want to choose those elements that are most important to the text’s effort to achieve its goal.

Audience: Your audience for this essay is the students in this class. In other words, they generally are people near to you in age and in college experience. You can assume that they have some familiarity with the text you are analyzing. However, it is up to you to provide them with the details necessary for them to be able to understand what the text says or looks like, to understand the importance of the text’s subject, and to understand the rhetorical effectiveness of the text.

Process:

Invention toward First Insight – Read the text you will be analyzing. Then read it again (and again, and again), annotating it as you go. In this case, annotating means marking those points where an element or elements of the rhetorical situation are particularly important.

Preparation through Research – the text you choose probably will mention other texts, other writers, so you should seek out those texts to see for yourself what they say and how they say it. You may or may not refer to them in your text. Also, you will need to find out a little about the writer of the text you are analyzing, the place of its publication, and its intended audience. We haven’t covered proper forms of documentation yet, but if you do refer to other texts, you must overtly acknowledge that you have done so.

Invention toward More Focused Insight – After reading (again and again) the text and annotating it, you will want to identify the purpose of the text and discover which elements of the rhetorical situation support that purpose, how they support it, and how each element is related to the others. Discovering these things will help you compose your thesis. Remember that a thesis is “a sentence (sometimes a few sentences) that forecasts the specific topic of the paper (42).

Also, it is crucial that you realize that the topic of your essay is not the subject matter of the text you are analyzing. That is, if the text is about DUI’s your analysis is not about DUI’s. Instead, the topic of your essay is the rhetoric the text uses to convey its message about DUI’s.

Strategies for Drafting – Invention and Craft offers good advice on drafting introductions, bodies, and conclusions for a rhetorical analysis. See pages 231-232.

Organization – Your essay must have an introduction, a summary of the text you are analyzing, a body, and a conclusion. How you organize the body of your paper will depend on how you want to present the elements. Do you want to start with the least important (of those you selected) and move to the most important? Do you want to start with most important and move to least important? Perhaps you want to arrange them from simple to most complex, or vice versa. Also, be deliberate in organizing your paragraphs. We have practiced two forms of paragraph organization: parallel subparts and comparison/contrast. Make use them when it is appropriate.