Personal Narrative and Analysis

ASSIGNMENT ONE: Personal Narrative and Analysis

The readings we’ve done repeatedly emphasize that we find ourselves in many different rhetorical situations every day, and each of us have developed a number of different strategies for succeeding in these various situations. Learning to write for college and for your future profession means, first of all, analyzing the new rhetorical situations you’ll face in those places and determining what rhetorical tactics to use so that you’re most likely to persuade your audience.

So, for this assignment, I’m asking you to look back at a rhetorical situation you experienced in the past and, first, tell the story of that situation, then analyze that situation and discuss why you chose the particular rhetorical moves you made in that situation, and why those moves succeeded (or failed) in persuading your audience.

You can choose any type of rhetorical interaction – from trying to talk a friend into loaning you their car for an important date, to interviewing for a job, to speaking up in a group about a particular problem – as long as it’s clear that this interaction was important to you as the main character of the story. Besides this sense of importance, a good story (any good story) needs movement and sense details.

After you’ve written your story, you’ll analyze it – that is, take apart the situation to discuss how it worked. You’ll do this using the concepts about rhetoric that we’ll be reading about in the first couple weeks of the course.

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to learn narrative and analytic strategies, and apply these to a real-life rhetorical situation you have experienced.

Audience: Your audience for this project will be your peers in this classroom. You can assume that they have the same general knowledge of rhetoric that you do (since they’ve read the same material about it), but that they’re not familiar with you or the situation you’re describing.

Length: for the story, two pages minimum (approximately 500 words); for the analysis, two pages minimum (approximately 500 words).

Key concepts: RHETORICAL SITUATION, AUDIENCE, ANALYSIS, ETHOS, PATHOS, LOGOS

Readings: Carroll, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases”
Blankenship and Jory, “Language Matters: A Rhetorical View of Writing”
Roskelly, “What Do Students Need to Know About Rhetoric?”
Johnson, “What is Story?”

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