Length: 4-5 pages, double-spaced
Draft Due: Wednesday, October 14th (shared to our Google Docs Folder- Please include your name and Rhetorical Analysis Draft in file name)
Essays Due: Monday, October 19th (uploaded to turnitin.com)
For your second formal essay of the semester, you will be writing a Rhetorical Analysis of a Political Speech. As you know, the term “rhetoric” refers to both the study and use of language (written, oral, or visual) whose intent is to entertain, inform, inspire, or persuade a target audience. Your task in this essay is not simply to describe the speech and the rhetorical techniques it employs; rather your job is to make a claim about HOW the speech creates meaning and accomplishes its purposes for its specific audience.
- Begin your essay by offering a brief description or summary of the speech.
- What is the “Rhetorical Situation” for the speech? This includes the context in which the speech was given (time/place/occasion) as well as its intended audience.
- How does the speaker use ethos to establish credibility?
- How does the speaker use pathos to engage or connect with the audience emotionally?
- Which facts, figures, and information does the speaker cite in appealing to logos?
- What is the tone of the speech? How can you tell?
- What rhetorical devices does the speech employ? (This might include things like metaphor or simile, repetition, appeals to the past, shifts in tone, diction, the use of rhetorical questions, and more).
- You may want to consider Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” in assessing your speech’s language use. Do you see any of the patterns or habits that Orwell describes in his essay?
A successful Rhetorical Analysis Essay will do the following:
- Offer a well-defined analytical thesis statement that makes an argument about the speech’s assumptions, strategies, or effectiveness.
- Describe the speech and its context clearly and concisely.
- Include textual evidence to support and illustrate each claim it makes.
- Pay careful attention to the language of the speech, rather than evaluating the merits of its arguments.
- Contain body paragraphs that begin with topic sentences that announce each paragraph’s focus to the reader.
- Be largely free of errors in grammar, punctuation, or word usage.
- Include a full citation in MLA format for the text of your speech.
