- For your second writing project, you will analyze one of the six speeches using the rhetorical elements and appeals we will discuss during this sequence. This assignment will enable you to practice your critical reading skills and your ability to analyze a text. As you begin drafting this project, consider revisiting pages 8, 27-29 in our textbook, your short summary, and our discussion of ethos, pathos, and logos. Make sure you print out the text of the speech and annotate it carefully. Use examples from text of speech to illustrate your points. Continuously link the ideas in your body paragraphs to your thesis. Your final draft should be 3-4 pages in length.
You have two primary goals for this paper: ) Figure out what each writer is trying to accomplish. This is purely speculation on the writer’s aims, since you cannot get inside of the writer’s head. You have to base it on the product in front of you. 2.) Identify the writing tactics he or she is using to accomplish this. In other words, examine how each part works or doesn’t work to fulfill the writer’s purpose. In rhetorical analysis, you are mentally taking it apart.
Ultimately, you need to address how the writer’s choices affected you as a reader.
As you analyze your text, be sure to consider the following conventions of rhetorical analysis:
- identify the central claim of the text and consider the author’s occasion for writing it
- locate and evaluate any uses of ethos, the emotional appeals (pathos), and the evidence and logic used in the text (logos)
- describe the context in which the text produced (when, where, what was going on in this country to bring about speech)
- describe the audience(s) (both the real and the ideal (This includes their demographics, values, personal and political interests.)
- address the ways in which this text (and its author) represents its subject, what it includes and excludes, and what the combined effect of these choices has on the purpose of the text
- Consider the following steps as you construct your rhetorical analysis: Select one of the six speeches that I have approved for this paper. <www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html> 2. Summarize the text. Offer readers a visual description of your text and/or examples of the author’s main ideas, supporting evidence, key terms, and other relevant information (tone, style, word choices). 3. As you prepare to analyze the text, look to your summary for help explaining the main ideas and organization of the text. Then, focus on its rhetorical effectiveness using the list above as a guide. 4. Absolutely, positively remember to cite and discuss examples from the text to illustrate and support your analysis. Do not assume that your reader is familiar with the text. Consider the ways the textbook demonstrates summary, 25, citations, 556-573. Here are your choices: Reagan’s “Shuttle Challenger Disaster”, Malcolm X’s “Ballot or the Bullet”, MacArthur’s “Duty, Honor, Country”, Hillary Clinton’s “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”, Bill Clinton’s “Oklahoma Bombing Memorial Prayer”, OR Margaret Sanger’s “The Morality of Birth Control.” Final draft due: See Syllabi. See sample below.
- Questions for Rhetorical Analysis
What is the rhetorical situation?
- What occasion gives rise to the need or opportunity for persuasion?
- What is the historical occasion that would give rise to the composition of this text?
- Who is the author/speaker?
- How does he or she establish ethos (personal credibility)?
- Does he/she come across as knowledgeable? fair?
- Does the speaker’s reputation convey a certain authority?
- What is his/her intention in speaking?
- To attack or defend?
- To exhort or dissuade from certain action?
- To praise or blame?
- To teach, to delight, or to persuade?
- Who make up the audience?
- Who is the intended audience?
- What values does the audience hold that the author or speaker appeals to?
- Who have been or might be secondary audiences?
- If this is a work of fiction, what is the nature of the audience within the fiction?
- What is the content of the message?
- Can you summarize the main idea?
- What are the principal lines of reasoning or kinds of arguments used?
- What topics of invention are employed?
- How does the author or speaker appeal to reason? to emotion?
- What is the form in which it is conveyed?
- What is the structure of the communication; how is it arranged?
- What oral or literary genre is it following?
- What figures of speech (schemes and tropes) are used?
- What kind of style and tone is used and for what purpose?
- How do form and content correspond?
- Does the form complement the content?
- What effect could the form have, and does this aid or hinder the author’s intention?
- Does the message/speech/text succeed in fulfilling the author’s or speaker’s intentions?
- For whom?
- Does the author/speaker effectively fit his/her message to the circumstances, times, and audience?
- Can you identify the responses of historical or contemporary audiences?
- What does the nature of the communication reveal about the culture that produced it?
- What kinds of values or customs would the people have that would produce this?
How do the allusions, historical references, or kinds of words used place this in a certain time and location?
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