Introduction
Finding a Topic
Developing Your Content
Additional Guidelines
Grading Criteria
Peer Review Guidelines
Word Commenting Requirements
Additional Resources
You are going to write a roughly 1000-1300 word argumentative essay that rhetorically analyzes an editorial or opinion piece about a controversial social or cultural issue. Using the principles of argumentation that we have been studying, you will first analyze the author’s rhetorical strategies. Then you will construct an argument evaluating the success of those strategies for persuading the author’s intended audience. Very good general guidelines for writing a rhetorical analysis are located on pages 100-102 in Good Reasons.
Be sure that the text you analyze is an argument. Arguments address controversies; their purpose is clearly to change actions, beliefs, or attitudes. An argument sets out the authors' position with claims and reasons. Other texts that are NOT arguments include: informative/news texts that merely inform readers about claims made by others; instructional texts that command readers to follow a sequence of steps.
1. Choose an article that you think has some strong points and some flaws, regardless of your agreement with the overall position. If you agree too strongly with the position, you may have trouble spotting flaws. If you disagree too strongly, you may have trouble recognizing the strong points. Your analysis should be a well-supported argument on whether or not the strengths outweigh the weaknesses.
(TIPS) Choose an article through the Expanded ASAP database, on the UT library
web site at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/e.html;
the LexisNexis Academic database at the UT library website at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/l.html;
or, use Google to find an article by typing
in either "editorial" or "opinion" along with your topic.
Try to be as specific as possible when choosing your topic. This will give
your essay better structure and greater clarity.
As you analyze your essay or article, be sure to work on doing each of the following:
1. Describe the article and its setting (identify the author, sponsoring organization or journal, implied or explicit audience, date/history). Describe the author's overall goal: what does he/she want to change in this audience's beliefs, feelings, or actions?
2. Justify the need for an analysis of an article by making an arguable claim
about its quality.
- ANALYZE the author’s rhetorical strategies, such as: the main sections
of the text; the sequence of main claims (existence, definition, cause, value,
action) in each section; appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos that support
each main claim; use of concession and refutation to respond to disagreements
about a claim; use of figurative language.
- EVALUATE how well these work for persuading the intended readers.
Authors may not use every option in a single essay. Authors may use the same option many times. So your interpretation of what strategies the author has chosen—and which strategies are most prominent—is also part of your argument. Make sure your claims are stated explicitly and supported with evidence.
As suggested on pages 15-16 in Good Reasons, you should perform a critical and objective reading of the article. For most if not all of your paper, you should attempt to engage with the argumentative structure of the article, rather than its moral 'rightness' or 'wrongness.' In other words, don't think of yourself as arguing with the author at this point; rather, you are analyzing how the article lays out its argument. In terms of audience, this type of reading will help you avoid becoming a part of the intended audience of the article and allow you to analyze who they are much more objectively. Read the article several times. Read with different goals each time. Try to identify major sections of the article—where the purpose or topic clearly changes. Try to summarize the purpose of each section in a few sentences. Look for key words to identify the main claim of that section. Then look for appeals that support the claim (logos, pathos, ethos), and so on. Remember that the author may have had readers in mind who are not exactly like you. You should consider the reactions that the author was expecting as well as reactions that unexpected readers might have. In the end, it may not always be clear what a text is arguing--or that it is arguing anything at all--so interpreting such texts can be particularly important.
Remember, you will have the option of entering into the limits of the argument at the end of your essay (no more than 200 words), offering your own personal experience as an ethical position, laying out an alternative viewpoint on the topic that the article is addressing.
Write a good faith rough draft. You are also required to turn in copies of any sources you used, including the object of your analysis. Please turn your paper in to the Teacher Folder before class on the day it is due.
Grading Criteria
I will evaluate your essay according to these criteria:
- Careful exposition of the significance and rhetorical context of your argument.
- Demonstrated ability to recognize argumentative strategies, as explained
in Good Reasons.
- Demonstrated ability to use principles of argument to construct a persuasive,
coherent, well-supported evaluation.
- Acknowledgement and consideration of alternative claims and conditions for
rebuttal.
- Effective essay organization.
- Clear and precise sentence-level rhetoric (grammar and style).Consult the
RHE 306 Student
Guide of the DRC for more information.
1. Open your classmate’s paper. Under WORD on the menu bar, go to PREFERENCES, then User Information. Enter your name and initials in User Information.
2. Under VIEW on the menu bar, go to TOOLBARS and choose REVIEWING. A new toolbar should open.
3. Now you are ready to begin your peer review. When you want to make a comment, highlight the part of the paper you are commenting on and go to INSERT COMMENT or click on the first icon at the left on the REVIEWING toolbar (it looks like a yellow rectangle with a "+" or plus sign on it. A box will appear at the bottom of the screen, and you can type your comment there.
4. When you are finished making comments, SAVE THE DOCUMENT on the desktop. Then drag it to the Paper 1 folder in the teacher folder.
- a sample rhetorical analysis that breaks down the appeals and argumentation of Dr. Martin Luther King's famous letter from the Birmingham jail.
- an example of a rhetorical analysis student paper
The purpose of the peer review is twofold: First, the suggestions you give to your peers should help them revise their papers. Second, carefully reading others' work should help you better reevaluate your own writing.The most important thing to remember when commenting on a peer's work is to be specific.
Steps for writing a Peer Review:
1. Your work for the peer review is going to be useful to your peer review partner, so be as locquacious (i.e., wordy) as possible in your comments. If a problem or point is obvious to you, make sure that you note it; it is more than possible that the writer hasn't seen the argument in the same way that you have. Also, the peer review is going to count towards an evaluation of your own grade, so please take the process of writing it fairly seriously.
2. Open the paper that you are going to peer review. Then, save it to the Desktop with the following name: "(Your Name)_Peer Review of_(Your Peer Review Partner's Name)." We will drag it into our class Teacher folder at the end of the class day.
3. Adjust the Personal Information in Word so that you can enter Comments in your own initials.
4. Read through the paper. Then, read through it again. Make sure that you understand the broad arguments that the paper is trying to make. Then, begin making comments into the body of the paper using Word Commenting.
-Write the kind of comments for your classmates that you would want to receive. Specific comments will help a writer far more than general remarks. Even when making global suggestions, refer to particular passages of the paper. Explain exactly where an analysis becomes unclear, where the writer needs a transition, etc. Word Commenting makes this easy because you highlight a specific section of the text to comment on.-Ask questions: Try offering your suggestions in the form of questions. You may frame questions such as "Can you support this claim with a specific passage?" or "Would your organization be tighter if you combined paragraphs two and five, since they express similar ideas?" This way, you can give your peer a number of things to consider without sounding bossy.-Don't concentrate on mechanical or grammatical errors. Your main job is not to proofread (of course, you may want to mark any distracting mechanical errors), but to help the writer make global improvements in the essay. Don't attempt to rewrite your peer's paper.-Determine what the writer means to argue (not what you'd argue yourself) and focus on how that message can be delivered successfully. On the other hand, don't be afraid to point out "holes" in your peer's paper. If you find a claim to be unsubstantiated, say so.-Be a skeptical reader. This approach will help your peer anticipate potential counter-arguments and therefore make her or his paper more convincing. Feel free to point out good things about your peer’s paper. However, you will not help your partner (or your peer review grade) if you say everything is great. Remember EVERYONE’s paper needs substantial revision.-What to look for: Clarity, organization, support from the text. The paper should have a clear focus and a strong thesis. It should move logically from one idea to another, and it should be clear how each paragraph supports the thesis. Finally, each idea should be supported by a substantial amount of evidence from the text. If there is no close analysis of the text, the paper cannot be successful. Mark any place in the paper that doesn't seem to meet these criteria. Look over the text or site chosen for analysis, then read through the rough draft, making comments on the following issues as you read. Be sure to end with a final comment that sums up some of your major observations:-Does your peer provide enough context? Suggest information that your peer could add about the author/publisher, journal/site and assumed readers of the text.-After reading your peer's paper, you should understand the article or web site's main sections and main claims--even without reading it. Do any parts of the article or web site seem under-described or confusing? What questions do you have?-Somewhere early in the paper you should find your peer’s THESIS or central claim. Highlight and comment on the thesis statement. Is it a strong, specific argument about the text? How can the writer improve the thesis? If you do not find a thesis, can you make suggestions about what it might be based on the rest of the paper?-Help your peer develop arguments about the rhetorical strategies listed below. If a strategy is NOT MENTIONED at all, suggest ones that your peer should look for. If a strategy IS DISCUSSED, how clearly does your peer explain how the author uses it? where is more explanation or more evidence needed? how well does your peer evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy for the intended readers?
· making implicit or explicit claims of definition, cause, value, and/or action
· supporting appeals to logos, pathos or ethos
· use of concessions or refutation
· style or tone of the language-Help the writer be sure that the paper has a consistent structure. · How are the paragraphs organized--by sections in the text? by rhetorical strategies? other? Does this choice make the paper easy to follow? · Do any paragraphs seem out of place--or go back to a topic discussed earlier? · How can the writer improve the introduction or conclusion?-Help the writer be sure that each paragraph develops and supports one major explicit claim. Do any paragraphs shift around between several different topics—which ones? Are any topics discussed in several different places—which ones?-The writer’s overall evaluation should be based on how well it is geared toward its intended audience. Do you agree with the writer’s evaluation? Why or why not? How can the writer’s evaluation be strengthened?