Rhetorical Analysis Revision (15 min)

I wanted to talk about two things for your revisions to your rhetorical analysis.

First, a thesis. In a first draft, when you are still figuring things out, you might not quite know what you are arguing. This is fine! As you revise, though, it is important to see what you have and where you want to go.

A thesis should be pretty specific. You should look at your analysis and start to notice patterns but also gaps. You should return to your text, your notes, the writing you have done, and start to see what available arguments there are to make.

This resources has some examples about differences between strong and weak thesis statements in rhetorical analyses.

And, remember, a thesis does not have to be in your first paragraph, it does not have to be one sentence, etc. There just needs to be some effort at expressing what you are doing in your essay and the general sense of what you found.

So, in the example above, here is what a thesis that is specific might say:

Thompson uses personal stories and tells of his extensive research in the area to make his readers believe in his credibility. These appeals to ethos, combined with his friendly tone, creates an effective argument for why college matters.

I will say some of these thesis statements in this example are kind of bland in their arguments, but they are specific. This example tells us exactly the thing the text does and then explains what the effect of doing that thing is. So, your task is to review your draft and figure out the primary thing (or things) the text does and what that effect is–and, what’s more, why that matters (the argument should be something interesting to us, your readers).

Getting to that place involves some good ability to analyze, though. I pulled an example from one of your pieces that I thought had the good template of here is claim, here is evidence, and here is comment on evidence that connects back to claim. Can you locate where those things happen?

Analysis:

Yorkie had lived most of her life in a hospital bed. She became quadriplegic after a car accident that occurred consequently of telling her parents about her sexual preference – which they did not agree with. Yorkie carried the limitations to her identity throughout her entire life and, at the age of 21, when she finally felt ready to come out as her true self and fully experience the world, her body stopped working, trapping her mind for the rest of her life. Many years later, San Junipero represented her opportunity to experience life, without the limitations of her unfunctional body. However, in the simulations, she still carries her emotional restrictions. An example of this is how she is wearing glasses in San Junipero although she does not really need them, since in the hyperreality her vision is unmarked. Yorkie: “The lenses don’t do anything; they are a comfort thing”. Yorkie’s glasses represent her authenticity as well. Kelly: “People try so hard to look how they think they should look; they probably saw it in a movie [referring to everyone else in San Junipero], but you [Yorkie], you are yourself”. Yorkie is not trying to relive her life or configure her identity, she is trying to explore what she was never able to experience, pick it up where she left it. Everyone else in San Junipero is pretty much trying to keep appearances of who they are, attempting to relive their youth and believe in the simulation.

 

 

Research Questions (15-20 min)

As Graves, Corcoran, and Belmihoub point out, curiosity runs throughout our lives. The research project is a moment to capture and seize that curiosity, and to try to sit with it through a recursive process of researching and writing (i.e., toggling back and forth between the two).

Even something you really know well might look a little different when you have time to really sit with it and explore all the elements involved in a process or concept, like you did for QSR4. I thought Ming put this well in his response about the stock market and publicly traded companies:

I have read so many articles about it and watched so many videos on it, I’m still unable to just come up with the whole process naturally. I noticed that I had to take pauses frequently to rewind the details. Also, writing about this topic helped me discover the blanks in my knowledge regarding to an IPO.

Your task for this research project is to come up with something you want to know more about. It is to ask a genuine question. Here is some great information on research questions from George Mason University’s Writing Center.

The key is to:

• be clear with specifics to understand the purpose of the research
• that it is narrow enough that you can genuinely provide some sort of response to the question in the space of the writing task that you have
• that it is concise enough so you are clear on how to answer it (sometimes if research question is too wordy or complex, it is hard to know how to get started)
• the response to the question cannot be summed up with “yes” or “no”…Ask questions that start with “what, how, why” sort of language.
• it is an arguable question, that it is open to debate and exploration and is not already largely “settled.”

I won’t be giving you written feedback on your proposal assignment for today, since we have been talking about it during our midterm meetings this week. But I wanted to give you some time in class to share your proposal with one another. Refer to the George Mason University webpage to come up with a really rough draft of a research question for one topic from each of you (I will pair you off unless there is an odd number).

 

 

Finding and Evaluating Evidence (20 min)

You did one reading on finding evidence and one reading on evaluating it. Let’s hit the highlights and see if we can try it out for ourselves in class.

• For your research question, what is the best approach to address it? What sort of field of study (e.g., history, psychology, economics, cultural or literary studies, rhetorical studies, marketing, sociology, environmental studies, urban planning, engineering)?
• What sort of evidence is preferred for that field of study?
• What ways of finding information would give you the highest quality evidence to research your topic? (e.g. library databases like Academic Search Complete or JSTOR or EBSCOHost or the Newman Library’s main search engine, internet search engines like Google or Bing, specialized versions of internet search engines like Google Scholar, specific academic journals that you know will have information on your topic, sites with access to image/audio/video–see here for more on that).
• The place to start for most of this is the Newman Library main page. You can use main search bar but also click “Databases” on right side of page to browse options to look for information.
• Contacting a librarian about places to look for information can always be really helpful. You will learn a ton because they are smart people who specialize in doing exactly what you are just learning to do: find and evaluate information. You can schedule a research consultation here.
• Thinking about how to search is important. More information on how to search on this LM3 page.
• Wikipedia is fine–just see what they cite and grab those sources instead!
• Popular vs. academic sources–academic sources nearly (but not always) always more reliable. Check web address like “.com” vs. “.edu” or “.org”. Something with “.com” or “.net” might not always be as reliable (just have to do more digging).
• Do you need any primary sources or just secondary sources? Primary sources are the original data talked about–e.g., your Rhetorical Analysis was analyzing a specific text, that specific text was a primary source. Secondary sources talk about data, so you citing a study of college students about learning styles would be secondary since you are not analyzing their data but their analysis of their data.
• Worth collecting your own primary evidence (experiments, making observations, interview people, surveys, personal experience)? If so, how will you go about doing that?
• Evaluating secondary sources:
  • how is it relevant to your research question?
  • who wrote it (expert? google or google scholar. expert but are they expert in subject they are talking about?)?
  • Reputation of publisher?
  • What are author and publisher’s goals and why?
  • How recent was this, potentially outdated?
  • how credible are sources they cite?
  • how specialized?
  • who was this written for?
  • enough information here to support your research?
  • can you access full document?
  • what is left out?
  • can it be corroborated by other sources?
  • what is web address and is that clue for credibility?
  • does it cite sources for claims?
  • mix of perspectives represented fairly?

So let’s try this out. Here is a first try of a research question (because they can change as you go!) and we are going to do a brief search to try to find and evaluate some evidence for it:

How susceptible are older people (approx. age 60 and older) to fake news and why?

 

 

Next Time

-I’ll be meeting with Group 1 at 3pm on Tuesday, October 27 and I’ll be meeting with Group 2 at 3:30pm on Tuesday, October 27

-Read “Questions to Consider as You Choose Sources” by Lisa Ede, p. 165-166 and complete Reading Annotation (i.e., Slack response) by 3pm on Tuesday, October 27

-Read “Stasis Theory: Finding and Developing a Thesis in Argument Genres” by Lisa Blankenship, p. 189-194 and complete Reading Annotation (i.e., Slack response) by 3pm on Tuesday, October 27

-Learning Module 6 activities due by 5pm on Tuesday, October 27