SKILLS
This essay assignment will help you to demonstrate the following skills you are learning in this course:
Student will organize ideas in well-developed, coherent, and stylistically sophisticated analytical essays.
Student will evaluate and improve their writing process by revising and editing their own essays.
Student will apply logical reasoning to identify and evaluate authors’ use of rhetorical techniques, participate in critical thinking class discussions and activities, and compose clearly organized and effectively argued written analyses of those texts.
Student will identify, analyze, and question stated and unstated assumptions of texts and draw meaningful inferences about the intentions of authors in context.
Student will discuss a variety of argumentative and analytical assignments and demonstrate the effective use of rhetorical strategies and an awareness of style.
KNOWLEDGE
This assignment will also help you to demonstrate important content knowledge in this discipline:
To be able to apply logical reasoning to identify and evaluate authors’ use of rhetorical techniques, participate in critical thinking class discussions and activities, and compose clearly organized and effectively argued written analyses of those texts.
Understand how writers use the denotative and connotative meanings of words as a subtle form of bias to influence an audience.
Explain and argue how writers make choices in order to persuade audiences to accept their claims by appealing to their audience’s emotion, sense of logic and reasoning, and by making themselves believable and credible.
TASK (INSTRUCTIONS)
Many residents of San Diego are unaware of how often and to what extent they are monitored by high-tech cameras with listening devices and other types of surveillance equipment all over the city that observe and record the public twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We, as citizens and taxpayers, are paying millions of dollars for this surveillance. Our city government, mostly behind closed doors, developed this plan with private businesses that manufacture and service surveillance technology. Our city leaders control them. Our police have access to them. Most concerning, the sheer number of cameras and other surveillance devices in use in our city makes us one of the most watched cities in the world, more so than cities in Russia, China, and North Korea.
There have been several news stories focusing on this issue. We are first as a class going to read and analyze the rhetoric of two:
“San Diego Street Lights That Spy,” by Matt Potter of the San Diego Reader. You will NOT be analyzing this essay in your essay (though you are allowed to refer to it). We will be using it to see rhetorical strategies at work in a news article. You WILL be engaging in a written rhetorical analysis of two other articles on the pervasive high-tech surveillance in San Diego:
“Technology Refresh – Smart Streetlights”by the San Diego Police Department. If you click on the title, it will link to the article, which is a PowerPoint PDF from the City of San Diego’s website.
AND
“San Diego Has Hundreds of Surveillance Tools. Now the Public Needs to Decide How to Regulate Them,” by Jesse Marx in Voice of San Diego. You can also click on this title to link to the article.
Your task is to engage in a rhetorical analysis of these two articles. After reading and understanding the sections of this unit describing rhetorical analysis and its elements, you will examine the authors’ diction for signs of bias, consider their chosen sources for fairness of representation of both sides of the issue, consider their rhetorical patterns, strategies, appeals and fallacies. You will also take a stand on the issue of surveillance in San Diego in your concluding paragraphs.
CRITERIA FOR SUCCESS
Throughout the units for this assignment, you will analyze and hopefully come to understand the many elements that comprise a rhetorical analysis. These elements will become your tools as a writer to complete this task. Here are some important considerations for achieving success in your essay:
LENGTH: Your final essay should be at least 1500 words long to receive a passing grade. In terms of page count, that should put you close to 4 full pages. Failure to reach the minimum length requirement will automatically earn a failing grade. Please strive to stay under 1850 words. I will use my own discretion when it comes to grading down for excessive length. If the extra words serve the essay well, there will be no deduction.
FORMAT: This essay will require MLA format as well as MLA conventions for citing sources in-text and on a bibliographical page called a Works Cited. You will be receiving a lot of instruction for using MLA documentation before the essay is due.
APPROACH: Your essay must analyze both articles in depth. You are not allowed to bring other sources into your essay. You are also not allowed to ignore one or both articles or to treat them superficially in order to avoid them while simply writing at length about your own views or experiences.
THESIS: Your introduction should have a clearly identifiable thesis that makes a meaningful statement about your essay’s main claim in regard to the issue of surveillance in San Diego and the two articles addressing it. After analyzing these articles, but before writing your essay, you will find yourself leaning in one direction or another on this issue. Your position or claim will be stated in a clear thesis in the introduction. However, the body of the essay will examine and evaluate both articles’ rhetoric. Remember, rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Your conclusion will echo and further develop the position you have taken in your thesis which has been influenced and formed by the articles themselves. Your analysis of the articles will reveal their strengths and weaknesses at this art of persuasion. PLEASE NOTE: I DO NOT GRADE PEOPLE’S VIEWS, NOR FORCE MY OWN VIEWS ON STUDENTS. I GRADE HOW WELL YOU HAVE LEARNED AND APPLIED THE TOOLS OF RHETORICAL ANALYSIS THAT I HAVE PROVIDED. WHERE YOU STAND ON THE ISSUE HAS NO BEARING ON THE GRADE, ONLY HOW WELL YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT IT.
LOGICAL ORGANIZATION: The essay’s organization will be guided by the elements of analysis you choose and the articles themselves upon which you are working.
CONTENT: The essay should have a good balance of your own exposition mixed into your implementation of source material. The essay should avoid excessive quotation and use primarily paraphrasing when citing sources. This will also be covered in my instruction.
STYLE: The essay should employ the skill sets developed during earlier units of the course including diction (active verbs, concrete nouns, avoidance of clichés and common expressions). The essay should use a more academic formality than was required of your narrative essay. You should avoid slang and contractions. Make sure you employ variation in your selection of sentence types. Your paragraphs should have clearly identifiable topic sentences that make clear why your use of source material is in each of those paragraphs.
GRAMMAR AND MECHANICS: The essay should be written in clear prose with special care to avoid errors in grammar, sentence construction, and spelling. Very few errors of any type should appear in a college-level essay. Egregious errors in English fundamentals will cause the essay to fail.
