Week 6/7 – Monday, Oct. 18, 2010
1. Roll/Review Office Hours and Location
2. Discuss HW Assignment Due Friday
3. Discuss Midterm Grades and Grading Weights for 1301
5. Go over Draft 1.1 Assignment
Draft 1.1: Rhetorical Analysis
Reading 6: E-Handbook Ch. 3
Objective: To demonstrate your ability to rhetorically analyze texts.
Purpose: In the first half of the course, you have been honing your writing skills so as to prepare you for college level writing. You will use all of these skills, (summarizing, paraphrasing, critical reading, constructing thesis statements, and using supporting material via quotations) throughout your writing of this assignment.
Description: After critically reading your text, you will determine the writer’s purpose and intended audience.
Once you have determined these elements, you will begin to analyze the text so as to determine the specific strategies the writer uses to achieve his or her purpose and to meet the needs of the audience. For example, you might choose to look at such elements as the types of evidence a writer puts forward and how he or she does so. Ask yourself if the writer uses evidence from sources, or if he or she tells stories from personal experience. Examine the sentence structures and word choice. How do these contribute to the author’s purpose? Evaluate the overall tone of the text, and determine how it does or does not contribute to the way in which it communicates to its audience. After you determine what these strategies are, consider how well these strategies actually work. As a result of this assignment, you should be able to take these skills and transfer them to any reading you are asked to do in college, and you should see an improvement in your ability to read and comprehend any text.
Although this is an initial draft, it should be carefully edited and written in a professional tone. Please use MLA format for both your in-text citations and your works cited in this draft.
Your draft should be 1200 words in length.
6. Go over rubric parameters for Draft 1.1
For draft 1.1, six of the criteria listed on the critical thinking rubric: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 will be applied:
Issue Identification and Focus
The student’s understanding of what a rhetorical analysis is should be the basis for this evaluation. The degree to which the student exhibits that understanding will determine what score is assigned.
Context and Assumptions
The student should demonstrate an understanding of the context in which the artifact being analyzed was written. That is, if the student doesn’t understand the purpose of the text in the first place, it will be difficult to write an analysis of it.
Sources and Evidence
Critical criterion here—consider the choice of quotations, balance of quotations used to identify v. quotations to analyze original author’s choices.
Own Perspective
The thesis will be the primary point of focus for determining this score. Specificity, accuracy, and overall understanding will be primary. Also, does the remainder of the draft indicate that the writer understood what he/she said in the thesis?
Conclusion
What conclusions does the writer draw about the effectiveness of the writer’s choices and of the resulting text overall? How specific and accurate are these?
Communication
Organization is the first thing I’d look at here—if the organization is poor, even if sentence level matters are adequate to good, the score will reflect that.
7. Look at Draft 1.1 Examples
8. Peer Review of Draft 1.1 Ideas and Drafts in Groups of two
9. Draft 1.1 Question/Answer – 5 minutes
HW: Draft 1.1 Due Friday at 11:59 p.m.
