In the absence of face-to-face classes, this Tip Sheet is for you to keep on hand and refer to through this week and next, while you draft your Rhetorical Analysis, and later fine tune it.
Approaching the Analysis
You’ve done the first step through your notes – describing in detail what is going on in the text. Keep these notes close and review them often.
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- Review your own questions for analysis. Ask yourself analytical questions of the text. Make note of any important contexts for understanding the work. What do you feel like the work is really about? Why? Those questions generally have multiple answers.
- Consider what larger purposes or meanings you feel exist in the work. How do the work’s use of devices contribute to one or more of these purposes?
- Isolate a topic – something you feel like the work is about, and/ or a social subject it offers commentary on. Most likely you’ll be choosing one of many. Perhaps part of the work comments on drug abuse, while the same work also comments on the pains of war. Generally, there is no single or right way of seeing a text – only what you can support with evidence of how the elements of the text create meaning.
- Develop an argument. Make a claim for what the work is about (again, it’s about many things, but isolate a topic – what’s relevant to your project). Use writing to answer the question: What does this work say about that topic? For example, if I say a work is a commentary on drug abuse, then I need to answer: What does the work say or suggest about drug abuse? This will become your argument – often expressed in your “claim.”
- Draft your writing, built upon your thesis and using the information/ analysis you have gathered about the work. And draw connections to relevant or social or cultural contexts that give your commentary support and significance.
- Give your writing exigence – or a sense of why your analysis matters. In other words, explain why your conversation matters. How does the work offer the reader/ viewer/ listener an opportunity to think about the subject? What does it compel the reader/ viewer/ listener to think about?
Starting the Paper
The introduction to a rhetorical analysis is an opportunity to do many things at once: grab your reader’s attention, establish your own unique way of saying things, and to set up the context for why this analysis matters. Take a step back, view the historical and social conditions occurring in the world in which this artifact was created, and hold the artifact up as a mirror to that world.
Consider the introductory sentences to this Vulture review of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 film, The Village, written by Emmett Booth:
“In 2004, against the backdrop of a presidential election focused on cultural conservatism and fear of the Other in the wake of national trauma, one movie used one of the most classic American archetypes — the isolated, close-knit village — to interrogate the national identity built around it. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village was widely dismissed as a stilted genre flick that took Shyamalan’s famed love of twists to the point of parody. Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot was one of the few contemporary critics to go against the grain, calling it “a great film that stands apart from just about anything that came out this year.” He was right: The Village is a parable about the 20th century disguised as one about the 18th.”
Notice how Booth opens by setting the scene for the analysis: the film was made in 2004 “against the backdrop of a presidential election focused on the cultural conservatism and fear of the Other.” The film wasn’t made in a vacuum, it was responding to something. He takes some time to describe the public response to the film at the time it was released, before settling in to articulate his claim at the end of this paragraph: “The Village is a parable about the 20th century disguised as one about the 18th.”
Booth does the what: tells us what the film is saying. From there, he jumps into a quick plot summary, and writes his review citing rhetorical strategies in support of his claim: the how. He arugues throughout that this creepy, fantastical film about a Puritanical farming village is actually a comment on white flight and the Trumpian urge to return to a version America that is “great again.” He finishes the review underlining the exigence, or the why: “The Village offers the hope that the kids will know – and vote – better.” His analysis tells us why we should care: because it’s about something that affects our future. Read the rest of his review here (Am I the only one who low-key loves this film?).
It is up to you, but I find analyses which situate the “exigence:” the issue, problem, or reason for this paper, to be very effective if re-stated in the conclusion of your paper.
Rhetorical Strategies
Here are my slides on rhetoric to review.
The following is a list of some rhetorical strategies. This list attempts to spark your creativity, but by no means encompasses all possible strategies. The list is endless!
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- Evaluate rhetorical elements: Ethos, Pathos, Logos, Audience, Purpose, Genre, Media, Constraints, Exigence
- Evaluate the artifact’s evocation of and interaction with tropes, cliches, cultural metaphors, symbols, and stereotypes, etc.
- Evaluate the details in the artifact and what they convey: color, light, composition, sound, musical elements, dialogue or lyrics, silence, etc.
- Use a “lens” to use (alone or in combination) as you analyze or interpret the artifact: economic or social class, race, gender, sexuality, ableism, posthumanism
Using the Language of Analysis
Remember that you are describing what the artifact says. The intent of the creator can be important, but it’s not necessarily the same thing as how the artifact has been received, how it’s purpose has been interpreted by its audiences, and the impact it has/ will have over time.
Refer to this helpful list of useful language from the Baruch Writing Center, and implement these clauses into your paper.
Here is help with when to summarize, paraphrase, or quote from your artifact or outside source.
And one of my favorite resources: lists of transition words and phrases to help your essay move logically.
Assignment Info
Here’s everything I’ve ever given you about this assignment, consolidated:
Core Assignment 2: Rhetorical Analysis of a Cultural Object
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Finally: you don’t need to make a political commentary. But you do need to be able to answer why this analysis matters to us as readers. A rhetorical analysis ultimately asks you to go through steps in order to break an artifact down into separate but related elements and return again to see the text as a whole and to see it (and maybe the world) differently. Remember, the final essay will be 4-5 pages, so plan accordingly. If you can portray the what, the how, and the why in your essay, you will have successfully written a rhetorical analysis.