In this project, you will draw on a range of concepts from the areas of both rhetoric and sustainability to to rhetorically analyze a text produced by an individual or organization. By successfully completing this assignment, you will learn how to analyze a source’s rhetorical situation and to grasp its argumentative strategies, practices that can help you respond effectively to other writing situations you encounter in school and beyond.
Assignment: In your RSA, you are to write a 1,250 – 1500 word analysis of a self-chosen artifact: a web site, organization, article, advertisement, speech, entertainment show, physical space, work of art, advertisement campaign, or, well, you get it. It can be just about anything as longs as it is rhetorically rich enough to generate a strong analysis.
This assignment also marks the start of your independent research, and I encourage you to choose an artifact aligned with a topic related to your own professional, academic, or community-based interests. The final product will be a multimodal essay posted to the course blog that accomplishes the following:
- Analyzes the artifact’s rhetorical situation, identifying–either implicitly or explicitly–its exigence, audience, and constraints
- Identifies the most meaningful means of persuasion related to some combination of (1) the emotional, logical, and character-based appeals; and (2) the related to core concepts of sustainability, including what we will call the double-triple bottom line (3 Es +1, 3 Cs +1), reflecting Edwards’s inner and outer landscapes of sustainability.
- Argues whether the artifact–given its rhetorical situation, persuasive strategies, and relationship to key ideas of sustainability–presents a fitting response to its rhetorical situation
Be sure to substantiate the claims you make about the text with clear and extended engagements with evidence from the text itself and from other relevant sources.
Tips and Requirements for Research & Writing:
- In addition to locating a text to analyze, you will need to conduct secondary research to understand the rhetorical situation that gave rise to the text, to provide context, and to ensure you respectfully and responsibly represent the organization that produced the text. This means you will consult relevant sources and effectively incorporate at least two of them into your analysis. We will address peer-reviewed academic sources in the next assignment; for now, you can draw on credible web and print-based sources as you see fit.
- You will also need to incorporate at least one image that relates to your analysis.
- Your goal is, to borrow the narrative theme from our last assignment, to tell a compelling argumentative story about the success of failure–or somewhere in between––of your chosen artifact. There are many such stories you might tell, and the process of discovering your story starts with building an inventory of everything you see going on within a text, which we saw Carroll undertake in her exhaustive reading of the Ad Council’s arts-promotion advertisement.
- Try to avoid using less familiar rhetorical terms explicitly in your rhetorical analysis such as ethos, pathos, logos, and exigence. Such ideas and terms should guide your analysis and provide a ghost structure, or implicit framework of concepts, but given the broader audience you’re interested in reaching, you shouldn’t bog your project down with specialized jargon.
For more direction, see the following two handouts:
- Ask Yourself (a list of questions for your reference)
- The Rhetorical Situation (a handout from The Writing Lab)