Comparative Rhetorical Analysis: Scholarly Texts:
To analyze something is to ask what something means. It is to ask how something does what it does or why it is as it is. Analysis is the kind of thinking you’ll most often be asked to do in your professional and academic life. The first step toward being a better analytical thinker and writer is to become more aware of your thinking processes, building on skills that you already possess, and eliminating habits that get in the way. Most generally, here are five moves that help you analyze: Suspend Judgment, Define Significant Parts and how They’re Related, Make the Implicit Explicit, Look for Patterns, & Keep Reformulating Questions and Explanations. We’ll be putting these skills into action throughout this unit.
In this second essay you will analyze and compare two pieces of rhetoric to find the components that make up different types of writing, and – more importantly – why these choices were made.
For this project, you will select writings from two academic fields to rhetorically compare:
Humanities
Social Sciences
Natural Sciences
Applied Fields
I will be providing you examples of each of the above that you are welcome to select for this project. You may also choose academic writing from the sources of your Exploratory Research Project. If you choose to do this, please run the proposed sources by me first so I can ensure they are: 1. scholarly, 2. written in different fields.
You have done rhetorical analysis before, either formally or informally, so the skill involved in this paper won’t be new. However, the content probably will be. That is, you’ll be examining two different pieces of rhetoric that share at least the same theme or topic. Your goal, therefore, is to consider how the conventions, the form, the purpose, and the presentation of evidence differ from one piece to another.
This will be done by looking at two categories:
Collection of Evidence: Types of data, questions the researcher asked, ethical concerns of the study, and validity of the study, etc.
Presentation of Evidence: Style of writing, arrangement of information, citation, etc.
Finally, your purpose is to do more than merely catalog or create a list of differences. You want to argue that these differences are somehow significant. I will leave it to you to decide how – or in what ways – you find the differences to be significant, but think analytically and complete the assigned readings to see how different fields write and why.
Your Audience
You should conceive of your audience as a group of writing majors, that is, students who know the terminology of rhetorical analysis but who are curious about the ways that terminology can be used to show interesting distinctions between two pieces of writing that appear in different formats. Being writing majors, your audience will demand thorough evidence for the claims you make. And the audience will certainly appreciate a paper that’s clean, organized purposefully, and contains a distinctive voice.
Evaluation
In general, your paper should argue for an interesting and significant thesis; it should be organized through a meaningful and developing structure; it should contain creative but solid evidence, designed to be persuasive for your intended audience. Finally, you should establish a credible, personal, and personable ethos (careful editing, fair analysis, well evidenced claims, etc…).
– Choose to write in either MLA or APA format but be consistent with your choice.
– 12-point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced, page number header (with last names for MLA), 1-inch margins, minimum 1.5 pages.
Due: Sunday 3/31.
