Your assignment #3 should be seen as a rough rough draft of your final Critical Analysis. The assignment is meant to get you thinking about your essay and to begin outlining the essay for your peer review. You should have at least two full pages that include a strong introduction, the three rhetorical tools you will discuss and a beginning discussion of each of those tools, or outline in some spots like mine is below (you can do all five pages now if you want also) The more you do now, the more you have to work with when the final draft is due– expect to do some revisions after this.
Remember, 12 point font, 1 inch margins, double spaced attachments.
Your essay should have this basic outline.
Introduction
Hook:
Your introduction should have a hook. In your definition essay, the hook was an anecdote. Because this essay is a speech analysis essay, the best hook type might be a quote from your speech. When you pick a quote, make sure it can stand alone and has a universal message. Try not to pick a quote that won’t mean much to someone who hasn’t read the speech.
Transition
The transition should include the Who, What, Where, and When. ALL SPEECHES will have a title. Speech titles always get quotation marks, like this, “Inch by Inch.” If your speech is from a movie, you will need to note the movie title also, movie titles get italics, Any Given Sunday. In addition, be sure to differentiate between the character, Coach D’Amato, and the actor, Al Pacino. AL PACINO is NOT giving the speech to the football players, Coach D’Amato is. Pacino is playing the coach. You may reference both.
Also keep in mind that under the surface there is another entity, and that is the writers, who are speaking directly to the movie going audience. You will probably reference all of these entities in your essay
Thesis:
Your thesis should have two parts.
Part One:
Describe the purpose of the speech. Which of the following is it asking a specific audience to do
Think
Act Differently.
Behave
All persuasive messages must ask a specific audience to do one or a combination of the three. Your goal as an analyzer is to name the specific thought, action, or behavior the speaker wants of the audience, both on the surface and under the surface. So note that the “Inch by Inch” speech has two purposes. On the surface, the speaker, Coach D’Amato wants the team to win the game (ACTION), but underneath the surface, the writers of the movie want the movie-goers to fight to reach their goals in life. This can be said of most well done speeches. On the surface, the purpose of President Bush’s speech to the country on 9/11, was to calm the fears of Americans, but underneath the surface it was to gain agreement to go to war
Part Two:
You must name which rhetorical tools the rhetor uses in order to achieve his purpose. Remember your goal is to go under the surface. It isn’t enough to just say Coach D’Amato wants the football players to win the game, you must also say, The writers want the movie-goers to fight to reach their life goals, and they do this by using the rhetorical tools, Polarization, Metaphor, and Repetition. There are several rhetorical tools listed in the WEEK FIVE “RHETORICAL ANALYSIS EXPLAINED” document. However, your goal will be to only discuss the three most used in the speech you have chosen.
See the example introduction below to help you write yours.
“You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s, that’s part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out that life is just a game of inches.” This quote, spoken by Coach D’Amato, played by Al Pacino in the movie, Any Given Sunday represents the essence of the speech, that life is just a game of inches. In his “Inch by Inch” speech, the coach is trying to get the football players to win the game using teamwork, but underneath the surface, the writers of the movie want the broader movie-going audience to fight for the things they want in life. He does this by using the rhetorical tools of metaphor, polarization, and organization.
BODY
Your body will be broken down by the order of rhetorical tool you include in your thesis, take note above. Also notice, your discussion MUST reference specific quote from the text. In fact every paragraph should reference a quote or two. Your goal is to talk about the speaker’s words, you can’t do that without quoting him. Also take note of how the quotes get inserted, direct quotes always get quotation marks around them. And they are always introduced, “In the very first few lines, when the coach says, “Three…”
Body Idea #1 (notice below that the discussion of metaphor is broken down into four paragraphs, I could go one more paragraph to finish the discussion of the inches) Each of your body ideas should take about 2 to 4 paragraphs each.
The use of Metaphor in order to get the audience to Fight to achieve their goals
The first rhetorical tool, the speaker uses in this speech, is metaphor. Metaphor is used in the very first few lines, when the coach says, “three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives.” He uses the metaphor “battle” to describe the game of football. Though the men may get hurt on the field, they are not going out to fight for their lives. They are just playing a game of football. The speaker might have used any other metaphor, a chess metaphor for example or a metaphor connected to strategy, but he wants them to see the game as a parallel to life. If they fight for the game, then they are also fighting for life. Ultimately, this appeals to the movie-goers who are watching the movie and the football game from the sidelines. This battle or fighting metaphor follows all the way through the speech. Later when he tells the team they are in hell right now, his answer is to “fight our way back into the light.” Again he uses the fight metaphor essentially making the claim that if they don’t fight, they will die. This idea is corroborated later when he says, “On this team, we fight for that inch… we tear ourselves and everyone around us to pieces for that inch, we claw with our fingernails.” He is saying that life is sometimes painful. In fact in order to move an inch sometimes it means clawing is if this moment you will die if you don’t claw with your fingernails or tear everyone around you for that inch.
The most prevalent metaphor in this speech is the metaphor of the inches. He uses it 12 times and consequently it becomes the essence of the speech. On the surface and quite literally, the inch is referring to the inches on the field and the small steps it takes to get the ball across the field. Those steps are so small in fact, that they aren’t even market on the field. In his first use of the word, he says, Either we heal as a team, or we are going to crumble. Inch by Inch, play by play till we’re finished.” the inches here still refer to the field, but symbolically, he is saying that we won’t just crumble and die quickly, it’s going to be a long slow painful crumbling, inch by inch. He also uses inch in this way when he says “We can climb out of hell, one inch at a time.” The inches here signify again, a slow and painful climbing. The point in this first stanza, is that nothing is easy. In fact to move past the pain, one has to feel tremendous pain.
The next metaphorical use of inches happens later when he says, “You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football.” Here, he is literally describing the game of football as being a game where one moves from one side of the field to the other with the ball in hand, sometimes it’s the inches and not the yards that count. But life, according the writers is also a game of inches. One person could start on one side of life’s metaphorical football field and in between her and her goals lies a dozen obstacles and people who want to steal her possession (in football is the ball, in life it could be anything).
Body Idea #2 This should be broken down into 2 to 4 paragraphs, very similar to the first point.
The use of Polarization in order to get the audience to Fight to achieve their goals
Body Idea #3 This should be broken down into 2 to 4 paragraphs
The use of Organization in order to get the audience to Fight to achieve their goals
