EH 091 Assignment 2: Rhetorical Analysis
Length: 4 Full pages minimum, 12 pt., New Times Roman
Due Dates:
Rough, Rough Draft:
Expanded Rough Draft:
Final Draft:
In your literacy narrative, you were challenged to draw on your own experience to develop an argument about writing and the teaching of writing. We thought long and hard about how our own stories might move our readers to understand the importance of writing and critical reading to our lives. Now, we are going shift gears a bit by focusing on how others seek to persuade us through their own literacy narratives. This rhetorical analysis assignment asks you to closely read and examine a published literacy narrative in order to analyze the different narrative and rhetorical strategies it uses to persuade its readers.
Your Task: Choose one of the literacy narratives we have read in this unit, such as Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Coming Into Language,” and write an analysis that explains what you feel the overall message or argument of the literacy narrative is and how the author seeks to persuade his or her readers to accept that message. You will need to utilize some of the basic rhetorical strategies or vocabulary we have been discussing (ethos, pathos, logos, kairos) and the narrative strategies (plot, character, description, etc.) we have discussed to give a name to the different moves the writer is making. Your analysis should answer the questions: what does the author persuade us to think or believe about the power of literacy through their narrative and how does the author utilize particular narrative or rhetorical strategies to persuade us?
Developing Your Analysis: Here are some tips on both telling a good story and connecting it to a controlling idea.
· Carefully Read and Annotate the Literacy Narrative You are Analyzing: print off a copy and highlight and annotate the text closely. Note where the author is using different narrative or rhetorical strategies in the margins of your narrative, and/or take notes on key passages in the literacy narrative that you feel reflect important or persuasive points.
· Develop a Clear Thesis: develop a claim or a main point that you are making about the literacy narrative that you are analyzing. Your claim is “analytical,” which means that instead of being a claim about how you reacted or felt about the literacy narrative, your claim will explain what your analysis will tell us about the meaning or strategies of the literacy narrative. For example, instead of saying “Jimmy Santiago Baca’s ‘Coming Into Language’ inspired me,” you would focus on what you are going to help your readers understand about the text.
For example, “Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Coming Into Language” illustrates the power of literacy to free us from the limitations society sometimes places upon us through the vivid contrast he creates between his life in the prison and the freedom he experiences as a reader and writer.”
· Remember that Your Audience Doesn’t Need a Long Summary: you can assume that your audience has read the literacy narrative you are analyzing. They know what happens from scene to scene. What they don’t know are the ideas and points you are going to share about the literacy narrative and how it persuades us to think about literacy in a specific way. Focus on what you are explaining rather than on summarizing with happens in the literacy narrative.
· Choose Scenes and Short Quotations that Illustrate Your Analysis: your thesis claim will explain your main point, but that point has to be illustrated with evidence that helps us see its truth or importance. Choose a scene to summarize or a short quotation (1-3 lines) that you feel illustrates each major point of your analysis. To get started, choose one quotation that for each paragraph and introduce it with a phrase or sentence that helps readers understand what the quotation will say or why it is important. Then, place the quote in your paragraph and spend one or two sentences discussing what it helps us see or understand about the literacy narrative.
· Organize Your Analysis Clearly: the paragraphs in the body of your essay support and expand your thesis and help advance your main idea about what the literacy narrative is telling us about writing and reading. As you write the body of your paper, you will find that there is a lot of information to keep up with. You know what you are saying so this is easy for you, but it is much more complicated for your readers, who don’t have access to your thoughts. As you look back through the body of your essay, you will want to build in:
o Topic Sentences: Sentences at the beginnings of paragraphs that explain what the main idea of the paragraph will be and help connect the main idea of the paragraph to your thesis, or the main point of your paper.
o Illustrations: the analyses of scenes, strategies, or short quotations that help your readers see the evidence for what you are saying about the text.
o Explanations: sentences that discuss the quotations, scenes, or other illustrations from the text you are analyzing and explain how they connect to or inform the main point of your paragraph.
Requirements
· 4 FULL Pages Minimum
· MLA In-Text Citations and Works Cited Page.
· MLA Paper Format-See page 429 of A Writer’s Reference for formatting instructions.
Please let me know if I can be of any help as you work on this project! Have fun!