Unit 3 – Rhetorical Analysis Essay Assignment

In your second major essay, you will compose a rhetorical analysis of one of the below listed articles or an essay approved by your instructor to show how the text fulfills its purpose, and works to persuade a particular audience. The purpose of this essay is to analyze a text’s contextual issues and writer’s rhetorical strategies to help you understand what makes something an effective (persuasive) piece of writing; and, to help you see how other writers persuade an audience.

Rhetorical analysis is the analysis of a text—oral, written, or visual—as a strategic presentation of particular ideas. By strategic, we mean that writers strategically use words and images in an attempt to makes us feel, think, or do something, (to persuade). Rhetorical analysis is a means to analyze how writers use words and images to make us feel, think or do something, and to analyze how effective their strategies are. Therefore, a rhetorical analysis basically explains how a piece of writing has been produced, and how effective the writing is at persuading us readers. Your paper’s thesis will make a claim about the author’s effectiveness and about the key contextual issues and rhetorical strategies you plan to discuss in your paper.

Your final essay should be approximately 750 words and formatted according to MLA style, which we will discuss later in this unit.

Articles for Analysis

• “How Junk Food Can End Obesity” by David H. Freedman
• “Four Arguments against the Adult-Rating of Movies with Smoking Scenes” by Simon Chapman and Matthew C. Farrelly
• “Get Football Out of Our Universities” by Steven Salzberg
• “Heroism: Why Heroes are Important” by Scott LaBarge
• “Time to Stop Hooking Up” by Donna Freitas
• “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age” by Trip Gabriel