Analyzing Rhetorical Techniques

Assignment #2: Analyzing Rhetorical Techniques
Due Date: Sunday January 15 by 11:59 PM (via Blackboard)
Format: Microsoft Word, three pages, double-spaced, 12-pt. font, standard margins

The main difference between this assignment and your previous paper (“Close Reading for Language”) is that this essay will propose a main, overall “point” or “message” to the story you are analyzing and follow that message through the entire piece, tracing out how it builds and develops. This assignment will also focus on the various methods the writer uses to convince and perhaps even manipulate you into agreement, or into thinking harder and deeper about the subject at hand.
Instead of merely describing the content of an author’s claims (“what” is being said and whether you as a reader agree or disagree), your essay should instead be an analysis of “how” the tactics and techniques that writers use to push her points across work. “Rhetoric” comes from a word meaning “to weave” (from the classical Greek) and this second paper should focus on how a writer builds an argument and a point-of-view out of the fabric of language.
This again means a microscopic attention to the way that words, punctuation and blank space are set down on a page. Remember how the word “argument” is being used here—in academic terms an argument is not so much a quarrel as a piece of attempted persuasion. As well, the paper should search for techniques like “hyperbole” (or exaggeration) and “antithesis” (or contrast). Where is there irony or sarcasm of tone? How are the active and passive voices contrasted?
As in your close-reading paper, you cannot be too “small” in register. Focus on the tiny elements with which an argument is constructed. Why begin a series of paragraphs on the word “The”? Why transition between paragraphs in certain ways? How does word-choice convey the writer’s emotional or cultural perspective? Does the piece use irony or sarcasm to undermine what others might take more seriously, or does it use excessive seriousness to weigh in on an issue many of us take lightly?
Anything that is set down in verbal language can be subject to this kind of analysis. This following thesis illustrates how the most over-used of words can be looked at with fresh eyes: “Sandra Cisneros’ piece ‘My Name’ seems to argue that one’s given moniker is both a blessing and a burden, something potentially empowering to identify with and yet something that can limit people by labeling them with certain associations.” Often a good thesis subverts or undermines our “normal,” common-sense conclusions and proposes a deeper, more detailed way of looking at a topic.
We too often think in terms of binary or dualism—simple contrasts between “opposites,” but generally the most productive thinking on a subject takes places in that dangerous territory in between. A good rhetorical essay can also take a seemingly simple verbal usage and dig deeper into some of its implications. This thesis demonstrates one specific way of going about this: “Personal pronouns are not simple, innocent words in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist horror story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’ Instead, a personal pronoun like ‘I’ grows from a slender, insignificant term into a tower of strength, the word ‘he’ goes from a term of respect to a term of accusation, and the word ‘we’ becomes an emblem of female solidarity. This paper will track and follow these various pronouns (and others) to demonstrate how they can function as sources of strength as well as methods of humiliation and disempowerment.” This thesis statement allows the paper that follows to focus on one specific usage (the pronoun) and thus stay on track throughout its argument.
Again, this assignment’s main task is to locate the central, main “thrust” or “claim” of one of the stories from our course reader and then to proceed to analyze how this message is developed. This means underlining and emphasizing those key moments in the piece where it uses specific language to convey its point and convince its readership. Your own essay will similarly use its own language to convince us that you have paid close attention to those methods used in an act of linguistic persuasion.

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