Comp I, Unit 2: Rhetorical Analysis
Objective: Introduce students to the concept of rhetoric and various ways of analyzing a text’s rhetoric.
These seven readings have been selected and sequenced so as to offer students repeated exposure to a variety of ideas about the complex subject of rhetoric, ending with a chapter about “finding [their] way in” to a writing assignment. The intention is to provide a foundation of rhetorical understanding that they will apply to a rhetorical analysis paper by the end of the unit.
Instructors can use the overview descriptions below (written by the authors themselves) to help decide which chapters might best fit your students.
What Is Rhetoric? A “Choose Your Own Adventure” Primer
by William Duffy
Overview — Providing an introduction to rhetoric is a foundational component of most first-year writing courses.1 Discussion of rhetorical appeals, for example, is standard fair in these contexts, as are activities that ask students to develop an appreciation for rhetorical situations, audiences, purposes, and even more nuanced concepts such as kairos and genre. Unfortunately, it’s easy for these concepts—along with the idea of rhetoric itself—to get taken up in these contexts as yet another set of keywords that have static and/or underdeveloped definitions, which in turn limits the ability for students to productively wrestle with the complexities of rhetoric as a resource for their own development as writers. This essay serves as an introduction to rhetoric, but it does so through the medium of a “choose your own adventure” narrative. Divided into ten sections, each of which contains a handful of rhetoric definitions that highlight one of its many qualities, this essay invites students to let their own interests guide how they come to understand rhetoric.
Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis
by Laura Bolin Carroll
Overview — Students are digital natives who spend their days saturated in rhetorical messages that they have learned to decode quite well – for example, they can easily size up an instructor within moments of walking into the classroom. As students look at various messages from fashion advertising to political campaigning, they often decode and make sound rhetorical conclusions about these messages. This chapter helps students understand the rhetorical skills they already possess, transfer these skills to classroom projects, and become familiar with basic terms of rhetorical analysis used in the academy.
Writing with Force and Flair
by William T. FitzGerald
Overview — Exposure to rhetorical figures, once central to writing pedagogy, has largely fallen out of favor in composition. This chapter reintroduces today’s students to the stylistic possibilities of figures of speech, drawing on an analogy to figure skating to illustrate how writing communicates with an audience through stylistic moves. In an accessible discussion of how and why to use figures, it provides an overview of the most common tropes (e.g., metaphor, hyperbole) and schemes (e.g. isocolon, anaphora) and offers brief definitions and examples to illustrate their variety and ubiquity. It discusses the situated nature of writing to acknowledge that while even academic writing employs rhetorical figures, not all figures are appropriate for every genre and context. The essay concludes with a set of style-based exercises to supplement a writing course. These include maintaining a commonplace book, analyzing texts, imitating passages, and practicing techniques of copia for stylistic flexibility. Some resources are recommended for further study.
Exigency: What Makes My Message Indispensable to My Reader
by Quentin Vieregge
Overview — This essay defines the word exigency and explains its value as a way of gaining and holding a reader’s interest. Exigency is defined as not simply explaining why a topic matters generally, but why it should matter specifically at this time and place and for one’s intended readership. Four different strategies for invoking exigency are given with specific examples from student writing, journalistic writing, and trade books to clarify each strategy. Special attention is given to remind students of their rhetorical context, the interests of their readership, their readers’ predispositions towards the subject matter and thesis (sympathetic, neutral, or antagonistic), and the possibility of connecting their thesis with larger issues, concerns, or values shared by the writer and his or her readers. The chapter closes with a discussion of how rhetorical uses of exigency differ depending on the genre.
Elaborate Rhetorics
by David Blakesley
Overview — This essay presents a working definition of rhetoric, then explores its key terms to help you understand rhetoric’s nature as both an applied art of performance and a heuristic art of invention and creation.1 The definition also situates rhetoric in the social processes of identification and division. The definition goes as follows: “Rhetoric is the art of elaborating or exploiting ambiguity to foster identification or division.” The chapter develops the meaning of rhetoric, art, elaboration, exploitation, identification, and division, modeling a process that anyone can follow with their own definitions of this or any complex concept. In the end, you should see rhetoric as more than “mere rhetoric” or “the art of persuasion.” You will learn to see rhetoric’s presence in all situations that involve people using words and images to teach, delight, persuade, or identify and divide. You will also learn the value of rhetorical listening for understanding the social, cultural, and plural nature of identity and, thus, our capacity for identification (or division) across contexts.
Understanding Visual Rhetoric
by Jenae Cohn
Overview — Visuals can dramatically impact our understanding of a rhetorical situation. In a writing class, students do not always think that they will need to be attentive to visuals, but visual information can be a critical component to understanding and analyzing the rhetorical impacts of a multimodal text. This chapter gives examples of what visual rhetoric looks like in everyday situations, unpacking how seemingly mundane images like a food picture on social media or a menu at a restaurant, can have a persuasive impact on the viewer. The chapter then offers students some terms to use when describing visuals in a variety of situations.
Finding Your Way In: Invention as Inquiry Based Learning in First Year Writing
by Steven Lessner & Collin Craig
Overview — Conventional literacy pedagogy in secondary education uses the five-paragraph essay to train students to be succinct writers capable of performing in pressured situations, such as state mandated tests. We aim to show students of first-year writing practical steps in transitioning into college writing by providing strategies for breaking out of habits that limit intellectual inquiry. Through learning critical reading, freewriting, and outlining techniques, student writers can compose in multiple genres in the first-year writing course and across the disciplines. These invention strategies can prompt valuable dialogue between teachers and first-year writers making the transition into college-level writing.
