Choosing an Article
The articles avaliable for analysis are:
- Boyko, Brian. "Fear Sells in Political Marketplace." The Daily Texan. 8 September 2004.
- James, Michael. "Cultural Decline?" ABC News. 2 June 2003.
- Valenzuela, Manuel. "The Stupefication of a Nation." The Big Eye. 10 December 2003.
- Carlson, Emily. "Media Giants Don't Always Lead to Less Diverse Content." News@UW. 9 August 2004.
Choose an article that you think has some strong points and some flaws, regardless of your agreement with the overall position. If you agree too strongly with the position, you may have trouble spotting flaws. If you disagree too strongly, you may have trouble recognizing the strong points. Your analysis should be a well-supported argument on whether or not the strengths outweigh the weaknesses.
Developing Your Content
As you analyze your document, be sure to work on doing each of the following:
- describe the article and its setting (identify the author, sponsoring organization or journal, implied or explicit audience, date/history).
- describe the author's overall goal: what does he/she want to change in the audience's beliefs, feelings, or actions?
- justify the need for an analysis of the article by making a case for its significance.
- analyze the author's rhetorical strategies, such as:
- the sequence of main claims (existence, definition, cause, value, action)
- appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos that support each main claim
- use of concession and refutation to respond to disagreements about a claim
- use of language, graphics, humor, and so on.
- evaluate how well these work for persuading the intended readers.
This assignment will help you improve your skills at evaluating argumentative strategies (types of arguments, appeals, structure, style). Authors may not use every option in a single essay. Authors may use the same option many times. So your interpretation of what strategies the author has chosen--and which strategies are most prominent--is also part of your argument. Make sure your claims are stated explicitly and supported with evidence.
Read the article several times. Read with different goals each time. Try to identify major sections of the article-where the purpose or topic clearly changes. Try to summarize the purpose of each section in a few sentences. Look for key words to identify the main claim of that section. Then look for appeals that support the claim (logos, pathos, ethos), and so on.
Remember that the author may have had readers in mind who are not exactly like you. You should consider the reactions that the author was expecting as well as reactions that unexpected readers might have. To explore the full range of possible reactions that readers might have, you may need to brainstorm with your peers or use a role-playing technique.
Additional Requirements
Write a good faith first draft. Your essay should be the equivalent of 4-5 pages double-spaced.
SOURCES: The main source for this assignment will be the text of the article itself. In addition, you might want to do research about the author and the overall rhetorical context.
SUBMIT: To submit your assignment, you need to upload the MSWord file to your blog and post an entry with a link to that file.
Grading Criteria
I will evaluate your essay according to these criteria:
- Careful exposition of the significance and rhetorical context of your argument.
- Demonstrated ability to recognize argumentative strategies.
- Demonstrated ability to use principles of argument to construct a persuasive, coherent, well-supported evaluation.
- Acknowledgement and consideration of alternative claims and conditions for rebuttal.
- Effective essay organization.
- Clear and precise sentence-level rhetoric (grammar and style).