Project 3: Rhetorical Analysis
Prompt
Select a text from the options provided by your teacher and write a rhetorical analysis of this artifact. Using a variety of rhetorical terms and concepts, assess the effectiveness of the author’s claims and overarching argument, as well as their various choices and strategies throughout the text.
Further Explanation
This assignment does not ask for you to provide simply a litany of terms or a “grocery list” of interesting rhetorical aspects of your choice. That is, you do not want to just “talk about” some rhetorical features of your artifact. Instead, this assignment invites you to put your rhetorical knowledge to work by using the concepts that pertain most meaningfully to your artifact to evaluate the effectiveness of the rhetor’s choices and strategies.
In short, for this paper you will make an argument about the effectiveness of a text and how it works rhetorically or has specific effects for a specific audience (or audiences) in its specific context(s). Your argument may be that a text is effective, ineffective, partially effective, or effective for some audiences but not others, because of certain rhetorical aspects of the text or ways it responds to (or doesn’t respond to) the rhetorical situation.
Your audience for this rhetorical analysis is other rhetorical scholars. While your instructor will be reading and grading this project, he or she will be reading it as a “general rhetorician.” Consequently, you do not need to define rhetorical terms from class that you’re using, but you shouldn’t assume a reader has intimate knowledge of the text you’re analyzing.
Rhetorical Terms You Might Deploy in This Essay
During this unit, we will introduce and cover the following rhetorical concepts, which you might deploy in this essay:
Kairos Identification Situated Ethos Invented Ethos Rhetorical Distance Pathos Enthymeme
Logos Arrangement Mythos
Values
Cultural Logics Ideology
(and others)
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