careful reading of a text or a group of texts

A rhetorical analysis is a close, careful reading of a text or a group of texts, breaking down and evaluating its rhetorical situation and argument. A rhetorical analysis poses questions about what meaning and argument a text has and how the meaning and argument are made. This kind of academic assignment is an opportunity to enhance your ability to observe anything carefully, analyze that thing, and then write up your observations and analyses. Analysis involves adopting the role of interpreter. Writers who adopt this role help readers understand the origins, qualities, significance, or potential impact of a subject (Palmquist 225). As Laura Bolin Carroll writes in Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Understanding rhetorical messages is essential to help us to become informed consumers, but it also helps evaluate the ethics of messages, how they affect us personally, and how they affect society (47).The purpose of this project is to analyze rhetoric(s) surrounding public and civic issues you care about. This project may also help you articulate a context for the rest of the semesters projects. During this project, you will rhetorically analyze one short video related to a current issue, event, or trend you are interested in. A two to three minute video would be an appropriate amount of material to analyze in 5-6 pages. Youll answer questions such as What is the writers purpose? Why? Who is the audience? What is the genre? What physical, social, and cultural contexts shape the texts development? What rhetorical strategies and appeals does the writer employ? Why? What effect do they hope it will have on the people who read/view it? How does the writer use evidence to support claims? Using a rhetorical interpretive framework, youll develop an analytical essay that makes an interpretive claim and uses reasons and evidence to support that claim in order to help your readers understand the text in a new way. Learning Outcomes: ? Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing a multimodal text and composing a rhetorical analysis ? Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations ? Use strategiessuch as interpretation, synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesignto compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those from appropriate sources ? Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas (kind of vague, perhaps delete) ? Understand why genre conventions for structure, paragraphing, tone, and mechanics vary ? Practice applying citation conventions systematically in their own work ? Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers and writers practices and purposes Rhetorical Purposes Explain to your audience the parts of a text, and how and why it is effective and/or persuasive Help your reader understand the text and its underlying rhetorical strategies Demonstrate your careful, appropriate use of rhetorical analytic techniques