Requirements: Length: 4 pages, typed, double-spaced, 12 pt. Time New Roman font, 1 inch margins on all sides. Use “How Thinking Goes Wrong,” and “The Dragon in my Garage,” as your sources. Use third person only. Absolutely no 1st person or 2nd person. Give your essay a unique title. “Finding a Rhetorical Voice” is not a unique title. Think of something catchy. MLA format is required, including a Works Cited page (See The Little Seagull Handbook 93-135 and the MLA tutorial in the Resources section of the BB course. Approach: Envision your audience members and deliberately write to them and not to simply fulfill an assignment. Using your sources, identify at least four topics that both authors address. Analyze the way the authors approach that topic, and then compare their differing strategies. Use the rhetorical triangle to help guide you. Create a thesis statement in your introduction that indicates which author is more effective. Arrange your paragraphs so that your audience understands this is a comparison of Sagan’s and Shermer’s rhetorical strategies. If you find the bulk of your material is simple summary and not rhetorical analysis, you’re doing it wrong. Use MLA citations to document all summary, paraphrases, and quotes. Use introductory elements with all quotes, and do not use dropped quotes. Convince your audience to adopt your viewpoint.
