Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Argumentation and persuasion permeate our lives. From the news media and advertisements to our friends and family members, they all in one form or another present arguments in order to persuade us to accept some viewpoint and/or to act in some way. The ways in which they construct their arguments—the rhetoric they choose—depends on what they are attempting to accomplish.
By analyzing the rhetoric, we can better understand not only how arguments are meant to persuade us (and how we can resist those arguments if need be), but also how we might make use of the most effective rhetorical techniques in our own writing. In this assignment, you will analyze the rhetorical features an author uses to argue and/or promote a point of view.
Please choose one speech given in the last five years to analyze for this essay.
The Writing Assignment
Your assignment is to write an essay of 650-800 words in which you will analyze the rhetoric of your chosen speech or monologue and evaluate its effectiveness. You can evaluate features such as logos, pathos, ethos, audience, diction, syntax, details, imagery, tone, repetition, rhetorical questions, parallelism, inclusive pronouns, allusions, anecdotes, logical fallacies, and others you may come across. Include examples from your speech to support your analysis; these can be in the form of paraphrases or direct quotations and must include parenthetical citations. Be sure to introduce your quotations or paraphrases with a signal phrase that gives credit to the author. (For example: “In her speech, Smith insists that . . .”)
The essay should be in MLA style and you need to include a Works Cited page for the speech that you choose.
Things to Keep in Mind as You Prepare to Write:
1. In order to do well on this assignment, you will have to be able to recognize and summarize the writer’s main points as well as discuss features of his/her rhetoric (you have to “prove” that the rhetorical features help to convince a reader of the speaker’s point of view).
2. You will need to support your argument with specific examples from the text. You may get a very clear feeling about the tone and authority of a text (for example), but
you must be able to pinpoint where, and how, you got that feeling and why you think it is so successful in persuading.
3. Remember that you yourself are making an argument—I will be looking for a strong thesis as to what you are trying to prove about your text and its argumentative strategies.
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