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TEACHING NOTE: ANALYZING A TEXT RHETORICALLY
Textbook: Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky’s From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, second edition (2012), pp. 32-39.
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Rhetoric
= how writers influence readers through language
= available means of persuasion
Rhetorical analysis = separating out the parts of an argument to better understand how the argument works as a whole
4 elements: situation, purpose, claims, audience
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1. Identify the situation
Situation = is what moves a writer to write
Writers write because there is a problem, or some issues that are needed to be resolved
2. Identify the writer’s purpose
Purpose = to respond to a particular situation
What does the writer want readers to do? To change our opinion? To make us aware of a problem that we may not have recognized? To advocate/recommend for some type of change?
3. dentify the writer’s claims
Claims = assertions that authors must justify and support with evidence and good reasons
Thesis = main claim = controlling idea throughout the essay
4. Identify the writer’s audience
A writer’s language can help us to identify his or her audience: well-educated? General audience? Children? Etc.
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“Cultural Literacy” by E. D. Hirsch Jr.
Para. 1: Cultural literary
To be cultural literate is to possess the basic information/knowledge needed to adapt to the modern society.
Children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate – this cycle is a failure of our schools, whereby teachers are compelled/forced to teach a fragmented and outdated curriculum (theories and practices).
We need to and we can break the cycle!
Para 5-8: The theories that have dominated American education for the past fifty years:
1. Content-neutral approach
Jean Jacques Rousseau: we should encourage the natural development of young children and NOT impose adult ideas upon them before they can truly understand them.
John Dewey: early education need NOT to be tied to specific content because a child’s intellectual and social skills would develop naturally
2. Content-specified approach
Only by pilling up specific, communally shared information can children learn to participate in complex cooperative activities with other members of their community.
Americans are different from Germans, who in turns are different from Japanese, because each group possesses specifically different cultural knowledge.
Plato: the specific contents transmitted to children are by far the most important elements of education.
Para 10-12: Mix approach
History shows that neither the content-neutral curriculum of Rousseau & Dewey nor the specified curriculum of Plato is adequate to the needs of a modern nation.
A human group must have effective communications to function effectively, that effective communications required shared culture, and that shared culture requires transmission of specific information to children.
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P. 39-41
A Practice Sequence: “Hirsch’s Desire for a National Curriculum”
Identify the situation: What motivates the writer to write?
Provenzo wants his readers to be aware of the problem embedded in Hirsch’s argument, whereby he calls for a curriculum that is controlled not at the state and local level, but at the national level by the federal government.
Identify the writer’s purpose: What does the writer want readers to do or think about?
To ask readers to think about Hirsch’s complaint/argument that there is no national curriculum in the State is incorrect.
Identify the writer’s claim: What is the writer’s main ( )?
There is, indeed, a national curriculum, one whose standards are set by local communities through their acceptance and rejection of textbooks and by national accreditation groups.
To criticize that Hirsch’s argument is biased as he only wishes to establish a national curriculum that is based on his cultural and ideological orientation.
Identify the writer’s audience: What does the writer’s language imply about the readers?
Readers in the field of American education
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