Over these first weeks of class, we have been exploring a wide range of texts (written, visual, material, and embodied), and we have begun to analyze how these texts work on a rhetorical level. The first project of the quarter requires you to continue this analysis on your own. For this assignment, you will perform a comprehensive rhetorical analysis of a persuasive text, one that focuses on a compelling and complex problem of importance to you and a discourse community with which you associate.
You can choose any text you’d like, though you cannot use one we’ve discussed in class already. Your analysis should: (1) identify the rhetorical situation of the persuasive text, (2) examine the rhetorical strategies used in the text by the rhetor; and (3) evaluate the impact of the rhetorical strategies on the audience. This analysis will ultimately be the basis of your claim, or argument, about the text.