English 1301

1. English 1301 Ms. Lowery: Week 4

2. Class Overview • Before every class, read the assignment description before coming to class • Audience • Purpose • Rhetorical choices/Rhetorical appeals • BA 3 Requirements

3. How to identify Audience • style, tone, diction • Who is most likely to be interested in the research?

4. How to Identify Purpose • What is the broad idea that the author is getting at? • What examples from the text support your conclusions about author’s purpose?

5. Rhetorical choices/Rhetorical appeals • Rhetorical Choices • Rhetorical Appeals • How? • You need to identify specific ways that writer’s create these appeals

6. Sample Article • http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/12/opinion/nathan-pot-legalization/index.html?hpt=us_mid

7. Activity • Write down your reactions to the text you’re working on. • Why have you reacted that way? • What did the author do to elicit those reactions?

8. Gettysburg Address • Context: President Lincoln delivered the speech at a ceremony dedicating a national cemetery for Civil War soldiers. Crowds of people gathered in a field near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863, to listen to him and other speakers. In July of that year, a Civil War battle that ended with 7,500 soldiers killed had taken place near where Lincoln spoke. • Lincoln gave this speech in the middle of the war, dedicating a national cemetery, so it must have been a pretty solemn occasion. He probably wanted his audience to think about why the war was worth fighting. He probably also thought that some of the dead soldiers’ families might be there listening—as well as people who had seen the battle or its aftermath. Did he think about the possibility that future generations would read and think about this speech?

9. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. • Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. • But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

10. Gettysburg Address • Purpose? • Audience? • Rhetorical choices? • Main ideas?

11. BA 3 • Description: The major essay in this course is a rhetorical analysis. In order to write a rhetorical analysis, one of the first things you will need to do is identify some of the rhetorical choices made by the writer that you can examine in your analysis.  Remember, a rhetorical analysis focuses on how a writer makes meaning. A rhetorical analysis looks at the devices or tools that a writer uses to persuade, inform, and/or entertain his or her audience.  A writer, for instance, may choose to use technical jargon in a text. In a rhetorical analysis, you would examine the use of and effectiveness of that choice to use jargon.  However, to determine the effectiveness of the writer’s choices, you must first determine what the writer’s purpose is and who the writer’s audience is. For this brief assignment, using the text you will analyze for your Draft 1.1, please do the following: • Identify the audience and purpose of the piece. Be as specific as possible and support your identification with a brief explanation (100-200 words). • Identify five rhetorical choices made by the author and describe how each choice relates to the intended audience and purpose. (Is the rhetorical choice effective for the intended audience? How does the rhetorical choice support the purpose of the text?) • Your description of each rhetorical choice should be the length of one paragraph.  BA3 is due before 11:59 pm on Friday/Saturday.

12. Example for BA 3 Audience and Purpose: • The purpose for David Nathan’s “Fighting Marijuana or Reality” is that Nathan wants to persuade the general public and people who oppose the legalization of marijuana that the American government needs to regulate and legalize marijuana. He does this by showing that its effects are not harmful, the reason there are violent Mexican drug cartels is because it is illegal, and the only reason it is not legal is because of people’s subjective ideologies, which are not factual. Since Nathan speaks about American ideology, he’s trying to target American people who may be on the fence about legalization of marijuana. His article is published on the CNN Opinion page, which is an American site that features articles about American social issues. Also, Nathan chooses to use the more common term “pot” instead of cannabis throughout most of the article. This appeals to a broader audience who would recognize the colloquial term “pot” before cannabis. Rhetorical Choices: • 1) Personal anecdote: In the first part of his article, Nathan gives an account of a patient who suffers chronic neurological spells and smokes marijuana to ease those pains. By doing so, Nathan is appealing to our emotions by showing how this patient suffers, but doesn’t suffer when the patient smokes marijuana. This anecdote helps give Nathan a vantage point because he shows that the cure for some people who suffer with neurological problems can be marijuana. This story gives people a different perspective about the drug and paints a more intimate picture because it relates a story about an actual human being suffering rather than giving abstract ideas. The personal anecdote helps Nathan segue way into his next point about how America needs to revamp their regulatory system for marijuana.

13. Review • Read the assignments descriptions before class • Pay attention to the additional assignment requirements in order to achieve better grades. • For BA 3, Identify the audience and purpose of the piece you choose for your Rhetorical Analysis. Be as specific as possible and support your identification with a brief explanation (100-200 words). • Identify five rhetorical choices made by the author and describe how each choice relates to the intended audience and purpose. (Is the rhetorical choice effective for the intended audience? How does the rhetorical choice support the purpose of the text?) • Your description of each rhetorical choice should be the length of one paragraph.  BA3 is due before 11:59 pm on Friday/Saturday. • Be looking for an email/announcements on course blog within the next couple days on additional readings for next class.