Length: 5-6 pages, typed and double-spaced, 1″ margins on all sides
Font: Times New Roman, size 12 pt
File Format: Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx)
Documentation Format: MLA
Rough draft due 11/1
Revision Reflection due 11/8
Final draft due 11/10
This assignment asks you to take the analytical tools and terms you learned in Project 1 and apply them to an article, book, or documentary of your choice. The goal is to deepen your analytical skills by putting them to work on a longer and (likely) more complex rhetorical object than the trailer you analyzed in Project 1.
By answering the following questions, you should generate a great deal of material that you can use in composing your rhetorical analysis. You will probably find that many parts of the text will reveal more than one aspect of its rhetoric.
1. What is the text’s central argument?
2. What rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) are dominant in the text?
3. What “stasis forms” does the central argument take throughout the text (e.g. definition argument, resemblance argument, proposal argument, etc.)?
4. What is the text’s target audience, and how does it appear this target audience has influenced the text’s rhetoric and style?
5. How is the text arranged? What are its parts? What is their relation to one another?
Remember: you’re analyzing the rhetoric of this text. That is, your goal is to explain what this text is doing to persuade its target audience, not to agree or disagree with the text’s major claims about whatever issue(s) it is discussing.
You must approve you chosen text with me by Thursday, 10/27. Below I’ve included a list of pre-approved texts–ones that don’t need my approval.
Rubric:
| Criteria |
Possible Points |
Points Earned |
| Strong Introduction and Conclusion |
5 |
|
| Thesis Statement |
5 |
|
| Analysis of the dominant “stasis forms” that the argument takes throughout the text or documentary | 15 | |
| Analysis of the rhetorical appeals that support the author or filmmaker’s thesis |
15 |
|
| State explicitly how the text’s target audience and constraints have shaped the text’s rhetoric and style |
15 |
|
| Support drawn from direct quotations (or scene descriptions) and paraphrasing |
15 |
|
| Organization | 10 | |
| Standard spelling, grammar, and punctuation |
10 |
|
| MLA citations, Work Cited page, and general paper formatting and length are correct |
10 |
|
| Total Points |
100 |
|
| Grade |
List of Approved Texts
Here you have a list of choices of pre-approved texts (articles, online essays, documentary films, and books) for Project 2. Preview several and choose one carefully. You’ll be working hard with this text, so pick a topic that you really want to get more acquainted with, and a genre that is interesting to you.
I’ve indicated below which sources are short articles/essays, which are documentaries, and which are books. I’ve also included links to where you can view or purchase these texts online.
If you select an article/essay or documentary, you have to analyze the whole thing (unless otherwise stated below).
However, if you choose to do a book, you only need to cover the introduction chapter and one additional chapter of your choice for your analysis, rather than covering the whole book. This should save you some time.
TOPIC: Popular Science
1) Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (book)
2) Documentary of the Same Name in 5 parts on YouTube(documentary)
3) Apocalypse Now: A Scientist’s Plea for Christian Environmentalism, by E. O. Wilson (article/essay)
4) “Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock” (July 2000)(article/essay)
Both sides on the issue of greenhouse gases frame their arguments in terms of science, but each new scientific finding only raises new questions—dooming the debate to be a pointless spiral. It’s time, the authors argue, for a radically new approach: if we took practical steps to reduce our vulnerability to today’s weather, we would go a long way toward solving the problem of tomorrow’s climate. By Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke Jr.
5) Can Selfishness Save the Environment? (1993) (article/essay)
Conventional wisdom has it that the way to avert global ecological disaster is to persuade people to change their selfish habits for the common good. A more sensible approach would be to tap a boundless and renewable resource: the human propensity for thinking mainly of short term self-interest
TOPIC: Food
6) Michael Pollan, Unhappy Meals (article/essay)
7) Margaret Mead, The Changing Significance of Food (article/essay)
8) Bill McKibbon, The Only way to Have a Cow (article/essay)
9) Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (book)
TOPIC: Culture/Cultural Studies
10) T. Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (book)
11) Howard Kunstler, “Back to the Future: A Roadmap of American Cities” (article/essay)
12) Miss Representation http://therepresentationproject.org/films/miss-representation/ (documentary)
This film explores how the media’s misrepresentations of women have led to the underrepresentation of women in positions of power and influence.
13) Martin Lindstrom, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why we Buy (book)
14) Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones (book)
Is the success of children’s literature troublesome? Is it phenomenal? How do we judge the value of children’s literature within the current culture that fosters the commercialization of childhood itself?
15) David Brooks, On Paradise Drive (book)
TOPIC: Economics and Consumer Culture
16) Francis Fukuyama, The Fall of America, Inc. (article/essay)
17) Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (book)
by Angus Burgin
18) The Century of the Self (SELECT ONLY ONE OF THE FOUR PARTS) (documentary)
This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings profoundly. His influence on the 20th century is widely regarded as massive. The documentary describes the impact of Freud’s…
19) The Take (documentary)
We heard rumors of a new kind of economy emerging in Argentina. With hundreds of factories closing, waves of workers were locking themselves inside and running the workplaces on their own, with no bosses. Where we come from, a closed factory is just an inevitable effect of a model, the end of a story. In Argentina today, it’s just the beginning. In suburban…
TOPIC: Politics
20) Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Gotta Go (article/essay)
21) Mark Lilla, The Beck Revelation (article/essay)
By taking Glenn Beck’s ideas seriously, the author gets as close as anyone has to teasing out what motivates the former Fox News host and his bizarre brand of cable tv and talk radio.
22) Brian C. Anderson: South Park Conservatives: The Revolt against Liberal Media Bias (book)
23) Paul Kersey, Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America’s Black Metropolis (book)
The white population of the city would flee for the suburbs, leaving the remaining Black population in political control of the city’s destiny.
In 2012, order still hasn’t been restored.
Now, a city of roughly 770,000 inhabitants (89 percent Black) has collapsed in a sea of financial mismanagement, crime, drugs, broken schools, eroding infrastructure, and hopelessness.
Detroit is the story of America’s future. Escape from Detroit: The Collapse of America’s Black Metropolis is the first of it’s kind: a book that places the blame for the complete collapse of the city on its majority population.
It serves as a clarion call – a warning – to other American cities.
24) Thomas Frank: What’s the Matter with Kansas? (book)
Hailed as “dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic” (Chicago Tribune), “very funny and very painful” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “in a different league from most political books” (The New York Observer), What’s the Matter with Kansas? unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas-a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation’s most eager participants in the culture wars.
TOPIC: Philosophy and Rhetoric (and Ethics)
25) Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (book)
26) George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (article/essay)
27) Gloria Anzaldua, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (article/essay)
28) John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” (book)
29) Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (article/essay)
TOPIC: College Life
30) “A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges” (article/essay)
http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/NIAAACollegeMaterials/TaskForce/TaskForce_TOC.aspx
31) Andrew Delbanco, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (book)
TOPIC: Technology and Gaming
32) Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (book)
33) Free The Network (documentary)
A documentary about the Occupy Wall Street, hacktivism, and the hackers trying to build a distributed network for the Occupy movement and beyond. You’re on the Internet. What does that mean? Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middle-manning your information from …
34) What Is I.B.M.’s Watson? by Clive Thompson (article/essay)
36) Generation Why? (article/essay) by Zadie Smith
37) Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (book)
Rhetoric & Writing I 