Overview: Rhetoric sometimes gets a bad rap. People often associate “rhetoric” with empty words or manipulation. You know better. Rhetoric involves making particular choices about language (images and video as well) in order to affect an audience in a particular way. Rhetoric is something we can study and something we can use to help get what we want. Many times, the things we want are good things, noble things, like equality, criminal justice reform, clean energy, or a date with a person we really like. For this project, we’ll take a look at some texts together and, in a sense, reverse engineer the rhetorical situation. We’ll analyze how texts work to deliver messages and affect the audience—a task that is often referred to as “rhetorical analysis.”
Purpose: This writing project asks you to…
- Analyze and describe a text within the context of its rhetorical situation, including, but not limited to purpose, audience, genre, context, tone, stance, and rhetorical appeals, among others.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of strategies used in the rhetorical situation.