CC English The Vast Changing Landscape of Political Discourse Essay

PROMPT:

For this assignment, you will write an essay in which you evaluate the ONE of the speaker’s arguments. This, of course, does NOT mean that you should agree or disagree with the speaker; instead, you will provide a deep analysis of the rhetorical strategies the speaker uses to convince his specified audience of his point.  

You will need to restate their thesis/argument in your own words and from then on, show how they did an effective or ineffective job at convincing the audience (meaning you have to identify the audience). Identify the argument and audience in your introduction. Then, write your own thesis, which should state whether the presented argument is effective or not and why (the why will be based on how well or not well the authors used the rhetorical strategies you read about), and then, spend the body paragraphs focusing on the different strategies and how they are being used.

Of course, you may/should also consider logical fallacies, but remember that these are false logic, so the author wouldn’t use them; he or she would commit them. The key here is to keep the words “effective” and “ineffective” in your mind (strategies used well make the argument more effective while strategies used badly or logical fallacies committed make the argument ineffective). You are not arguing about the topic at hand; you are arguing whether or not the authors wrote their article well.

You are analyzing the way the author presented his or her argument to argue whether it is an effective or ineffective argument.

In order to analyze the argument, you will consider the author’s use of:

• Pathos
• Ethos
• Logos
• Assumptions
• Organization
• Logical Fallacies
• Tone
• Types/Strength of evidence
• Objectivity/Bias

FURTHER DIRECTIONS:

You will need to:

1. Point out any instances where the author used one of these elements by providing a quote from the text.
2. Comment on whether or not the author did so well/whether the use of this strategy contributed to effectiveness of his or her argument and how. You don’t want to just say that the author used the strategy well; you have to explain why or how that is.