For your first major writing project in this course, you analyzed the rhetorical strategies for a piece of visual rhetoric to see how it persuaded the audience. For your second major project, you will analyze the rhetorical strategies of a piece of writing or speech to see how it works. If you’d like, you have the option to choose two texts or speeches to analyze and compare and contrast how they influence their audiences by using rhetoric. We’ll discuss several texts together as a class, and then you’ll choose one or two to analyze on your own. One of the major goals of this course is learning how to read in a more critical way, as opposed to reading for information or to understand where the author is coming from, and this can be a more difficult mode of reading to master. This project will help you to practice this mode of reading, also known as reading with and against the grain. This assignment will also reinforce the main rhetorical concepts that you learned from the Visual Analysis, such as ethos, pathos, logos, and angle of vision. These concepts will be useful to you not only as a reader, but also as a writer trying to persuade your own readers.
Since every reader interprets a text differently, your goal here is to give your classmates and your instructors your own unique analysis of one of the primary texts. After reading your rhetorical analysis, your readers should come away with a new and better understanding of how the author tried to persuade his or her audience. Like the visual analysis, this essay will be a closed-form, thesis-driven essay.
Analysis vs. Argument: Remember that evaluating a text’s rhetorical strategies does NOT mean focusing on whether or not you agree with the author’s position. Instead, it means paying careful attention to what the author is saying to his or her audience, how he or she is saying it, who that audience is, what rhetorical strategies the author is using, and whether or not you think the author’s rhetorical choices are effective in this particular case. To break the text down that way, you’ll have to analyze rhetorical concepts such as purpose, audience, and genre; pathos, logos, and ethos; and angle of vision. Instead of arguing with the author, analyze whether the author’s arguments hold water and why or why not. You’ll also have to support your points with examples from the text and summarize the piece you’re writing about at the beginning of your paper. As with the Visual Analysis essay, you should assume that your audience hasn’t read the primary text that you’re analyzing.
