Description: You will begin by selecting an oration that is compelling to you. This oration can be historical or modern. You may find orations in podcasts, ted-talks, Netflix specials, and in many other unexpected locations, so be on the lookout! The criteria for your selection is that the oration must be meant to be heard (a transcript is fine if recording technology didn't exist yet) and argumentative. It can be a real-world, non-fictitious address, or a fictional address. (If your oration is fictional, your audience is the one in the movie/show, not the real world audience.) Once you have selected an oration, you will conduct a rhetorical analysis of this oration. Your analysis should include:
A description of the orator's main argument and how they support it with evidence.
Contextualization and Situation. It is helpful to understand the context in which the oration takes place. How are the events, culture, religion, etc. shaping the argument and support? What is the situation in which the orator is giving the oration and what situation is the oration responding to?
Audience. Describe relevant elements of the rhetor's audience.
Appeals and Rhetorical strategies. You will identify appeals and rhetorical strategies that the orator chose and explain how those strategies are persuasive for the audience.
Appeals.
Fundamental writing elements. Including an intro paragraph with a thesis, purposeful arrangement, clear paragraphing, and a Conclusion that explains why this rhetorical analysis matters beyond the context of the oration itself.
Specs: 3-4 pages, MLA formatting
In Project 1, you were analyzing artifacts to understand the deeper rhetorical workings at play. In Project 2, your task will be to create a rhetorical utterance of your own.
Requirements: compose an persuasive text intended to persuade a specific audience. This text will need to include at least 4-5 rhetorical strategies and purposeful arrangement geared toward moving the audience to the rhetor's (yours) persuasive goal. Your strategies should intend to reinforce or collapse societal values. Building from our previous learning, your text will need to include writing elements that we strengthened in project 1 (thesis, "So what", internal structure). Therefore, your text will have to 1) reiterates values of a selected community and 2) persuades audiences in some capacity.
Things to consider:
You text must be composed for a specific audience, in particular, you need to think about specific community(ies) that will be receptive to your argument. How can you best reach this audience? On what occasions will these people access your text?
Remember that every part of your text needs to be moving toward a particular persuasive goal. This means that the mode in which you are imagining for your writing (magazine article, TedTalk, open letter, ceremonial address, etc.) must be appropriate for the audience.
Your persuasive goal must be attainable. Do we want to eradicate racism? Yes. Is that going to happen with one masterful speech, no. Think about smaller goals along the way that are possible to enact. For example, instead of eradicating racism, your goal is to have people commit to being anti-racist.
Project Specs: 3-4 pages, MLA formatting
The purpose of this assignment is to: 1) reflect on the choices you made in your writing, 2) strengthen your ability to identify areas for improvement in your writing, 2) make significant changes in your writing. The goal of this assignment is to help you understand that writing can always be improved and to give you space to reflect on your work.
Your assignment: You will submit a revised version of your project 2 paper in a new genre with significant changes made to arguments, structure, language. Although you may include sentence level changes, this is not an editing assignment. You will be graded based on your ability to revise and reflect on your work. Your new genre should be appropriate to your audience and should work toward your rhetorical goal.
Specs:
Revision: 4-5 pages (or mew media equivalent) MLA formatting (you may have one additional page to make changes. Ex. If P1 was ~3 pages, the revision should be ~4 pages).