instuction for this assigment:
The main difference between this assignment and your previous paper (“Close Reading for Language”) is that this essay will propose a main “point” or “message” to the story or poem you are analyzing and follow that message through the entire piece, tracing out how it builds and develops. This assignment will also focus on the various methods the writer uses to convince and perhaps even manipulate you into agreement, or into thinking harder and deeper on the subject at hand.
Instead of merely describing the content of an author’s claims (“what” is being said and whether you as a reader agree or disagree), your essay should instead be an analysis of “how” the tactics and techniques that writers use to push her points across work. “Rhetoric” comes from a word meaning “to weave” (from the classical Greek) and this third paper should focus on how a writer builds an argument and a point-of-view out of the fabric of language.
This again means a microscopic attention to the way that words, punctuation and blank space are set down on a page. Remember how the word “argument” is being used here—in academic terms an argument is not so much a quarrel as a piece of attempted persuasion. As well, the paper should search for techniques like “hyperbole” (or exaggeration) and “antithesis” (or contrast). Where is there irony or sarcasm of tone? How are the active and passive voices contrasted?
As in your close-reading paper, you cannot be too “small” in register. Focus on the tiny elements with which an argument is constructed. We too often think in terms of binary or dualism—simple contrasts between “opposites,” but generally the most productive thinking on a subject takes places in that dangerous territory in between.
Again, this assignment’s main task is to locate the central, main “thrust” or “claim” of one of the poems or stories from our course reader and then to proceed to analyze how this message is developed. This means underlining and emphasizing those key moments in the piece where it uses specific language to convey its point and convince its readership. Your own essay will similarly use its own language to convince us that you have paid close attention to those methods used in an act of linguistic persuasion.
As with your last assignment, please choose from one of the topics below and be sure that each of your own sentences (outside of the first one or two and the last one or two) contains a direct quote from the work being analyzed:
Walter Abish’s “Alphabetical Africa” passage only uses words beginning with the letters a, b, and c—how does this author use the limited, constricted pattern to portray Africa’s history of colonialism and subjugation?
Basho’s “Briefly We Glisten” and some of the other haiku in our handout are brief poems of seventeen syllables each—how do they comment on the quick, flashing brevity of our lives and our perceptions?
Pablo Neruda’s “The Book of Questions” is composed entirely of interrogatives. If one keeps an open ear, one will hear hundreds or perhaps thousands of questions in the average day of a New Yorker. How does Neruda’s piece comment on our need to ask?
The U.S. Constitution promises a separation of church and state, but how does Sonia Singh’s story “Goddess for Hire” comment on the intersection between religion and commerce?
“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin treats the public performance of jazz music as a religious ceremony—how does its rhetoric elevate Entertainment to Ritual?
Osama Alomar’s “The Teeth and the Comb” is a collection of short micro-fictions, many of which are titled “— and —.” How does this passage comment on the human compulsion to divide things into opposing pairs?
Pascale Petit’s “Mama Amazonica” is a surrealistic account of the author’s mother’s stay in a mental ward for hallucinating herself as the Amazonian rainforest. How does this piece question our beliefs in what constitutes “mental illness”?
Marcia Douglas’ “The Language of Snails” imagines women turning into snails to escape the drudgery of their domestic lives. How does this story imagine the relations between human and non-human animals?
Eduardo Galeano’s “Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World” is a bitter political tirade about the general unfairness of modern economics. How does it use to theme of “inversion” to describe our contemporary world?
Olive Senior’s “Gardening in the Tropics” uses the motif of agriculture to describe political and cultural life in the Caribbean. How do plants and soil function as metaphors throughout this piece?
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi’s “In the Garden of Mystic Lovers” is a series of meditations from one of the classic voices in Sufism. How does this series of sayings comment on the interrelation between love of God and love between humans?
Aimee Bender’s “Fruit and Words” tries to trouble the line between objects and the words for those objects. How does the language of Bender’s story take on an animated life of its own?
Larissa Lai’s “Salt Fish Girl” seems to be a parable on the thematic connection between Woman and Water. How does Lai use fluidity as a prime metaphor of the Feminine?
Mary TallMountain’s “There is No Word for Goodbye” frames Native American life as an endless cycle with no ultimate farewells. How does the language of her piece accentuate this sense of endlessness?
Kazim Ali’s “Notes on Silence/Syllabus for a Semester on Silence” deals with all the ways the “wordlessness” can still “speak.” How does Ali ironically use language to suggest some of the things that language can’t do?
so I had choose the fisrt one of all 15 or you can also choose it by yourself but i will not able to privide the reading for you
Here are a few more tips to improve your essays:
Your paper needs a creative, orginal title—“Analyzing Rhetorical Techniques” isn’t a title, it’s the name of the assignment.
Try to keep within three pages—while going a little over the page limit can be a mark of enthusiasm that should be applauded, good writing is also about knowing what to trim and how to phrase your ideas compactly and economically
Similarly, always try to trim away excess wording “further her attempt into persuading the reader” can just be written as “tries to persuade her reader”
Staying on the surface level isn’t enough—these papers aren’t book reports and can’t merely paraphrase or summarize what the author has already stated
Quotation marks should always come in pairs—avoid quotations that close but don’t open or open but don’t close
there are guideline and sample for the essay attached
reading attached below (I only have this reading)
dear writer If you have any question please let me know. thanks !
please dont use any AI program or traslator because it will show it to my professor from the college system
