This essay will be a 3-4 page rhetorical analysis of our assigned De La Pena text: “Sometimes the ‘Tough’ Teen is Quietly Writing.” Your essay must go through a final polish after submitting it to tutors to help you identify and correct major errors.
Your Purpose
Based on your course readings and activities so far, this assignment asks you to think about how and why a written text works (or doesn’t work) rhetorically.
Your Audience
Your audience for this assignment is your classmates and me.
Citation and Documentation
If you quote from your text (and you should), you must include proper MLA in-text citation and a works cited entry.
Tips for Doing a Rhetorical Analysis
The first thing to do is read and study the text under analysis. Based on your reading, you must pinpoint the argument in the text; in other words, you have to decide what you think the author is trying to persuade the audience to think or do.
Then, try to develop an interesting and specific claim about the text itself. You are not entering into this conversation via your viewpoint on the writer’s argument. Instead you are thinking about how the text is working, what types of appeals it relies on, what types of language it uses, how it establishes logos, ethos, and pathos, and the ways it engages with the issue at hand. In short, you’ll need to be rhetorical and not political as you work out your analysis.
Next, identify those places in the text that speak directly to your thesis. What parts of the essay make you argue what you’re arguing in your analysis? How and why did they make you come to your claim or conclusion? At this point you might also want to think about organization. How might you best incorporate these points into your rhetorical analysis? In what order should they go?
Then, start writing. In a formal essay, you’ll probably begin with an engaging introduction that also includes your very specific thesis statement.
Too vague: “Janice Turner uses several different kinds of arguments in her article ‘Cutting Edge’” is vague and uninformative.
Good: “In ‘Cutting Edge,’ Janice Turner seems to present only the facts about cosmetic surgery, but her word choices and examples affect readers’ emotions just as strongly as their brains.”
Early in your paper, identify the rhetorical situation for the article or essay you’re analyzing. In other words, explain who you think the target audience is and why you think the author wrote the piece. This discussion will provide important background information for your readers.
As you move into the body of your essay, you’ll need to analyze the elements of the text you have identified in your thesis. You do this by first summarizing or even quoting the portion of the text you want to deal with. It’s your job to provide context for such descriiptions. Next, use your own writing and thinking to demonstrate how this section of the text is working in reference to your claim. Be very clear about how this particular section of the text advances what you intend to say about the article as a whole. This is your analysis section, and it’s the most important thing you will do in this paper. Finally, conclude your essay with a synthesis (weaving) of the analytical work you’ve done, and leave your reader with something interesting to think about in the conclusion.
If you get stuck, you have multiple rhetorical analysis samples in Modules 6 and 7 that you refer to for examples.
What should not be included in your rhetorical analysis
Keep in mind that your focus is not on your own opinion about the topic, but on explaining how the author of the article has put together his argument and how he appeals to the audience. In other words, if you were writing about an essay discussing the war in Iraq, what you think about the war would not be the focus; rather, you would need to show how the author argues his point and how his strategy is working.
–>You should use only third person in this essay (he/she/they/it) and no first person (I/me/my/our) and no second person (you/your).
