We spent class reading through your process writing + the drafts for the "practice analysis" assignment on Haygood.

We started out by reviewing the steps for the process, and talking about how to  provide feedback on making effective use of each of the steps in the process to develop a practice paper where you did a rhetorical analysis of Haygood's essay.

To meet the demands of this assignment (see assignment sheet posted to the right), you needed to develop a focus on how/whether/why Haygood's essay "worked".   The assignment requires you to evaluate Haygood's moves (in terms of audience, purpose, form and the rhetorical appeals), and, if appropriate,  to suggest what he could do better.

Process for developing a Rhetorical Analysis of Haygood.
Step 1.  Read the essay

Steps 2-5. In general, we looked at steps 2- 5 as working together as produce writing that will help with: 1)gathering evidence for what the essay "does,"  and 2)  finding a focus (deciding what to write about).

Gathering evidence: Evidence of what the essay did + how it worked included: point-by-point analysis of how the essay works, identification of the audience and purpose for the essay, and  examples of ethos, pathos, and logos moves within the writing.

Finding a focus:  As you worked on these steps, you also paid attention to what the essay did and the effectiveness of its moves.  So writing to steps 2-5 included noting patterns that could suggest a focus.  So you noted the ethos, pathos, and logos moves and paid attention to when and where they were made.  And you noted: the use of "stories" versus "facts"; the predominance of personal writing, with not much "political" writing about government responsilities; the why the author doesn't write about himself, and the way he uses language (does not use the word "fat"), and so on.    In light of these observations, suitable focuses for this assignment might be:  how/why the essay is effective (or not) for its audience; whether or not it is directed at the RIGHT audience so as to achieve the author's purpose; whether or not the essay makes the right points in the right order to achieve its purpose, (and so on).

Step 6. Identifying a set of points you could make about this essay.  This list might also help you identify a focus.

For example, if you notice that most of your evidence is about ethos & pathos moves and the kind of personal perspective the author takes, you might decide on a focus that evaluates the use of a personal/narrative perspective to achieve Haygood's purpose.

If you already have a focus, this step can help you list the possible arguments - so that you choose the best ones from the list (and don't waste time on a not very good point that happened to be the first one that came into your mind).

Step 7. Use points to start development,  This step lets you develop some writing to develop your points.  You should probably have a good idea of your focus at this point, but this step will also help develop the focus.

Step 8. Map out the essay.  This step is like an outline, but not so demanding.  It lets you step back, to see how the "skeleton" of your essay looks.  The most useful writing for this step will propose an overview of the  organization that includes the moves/points for the intro/body/and conclusion.  This structure will reflect the moves characteristic of analytic writing (naming + classifying moves, and pointing out relationships + stating directly what those relationships show with respect to the focus).

Step 9.  Write an intro to introduce the essay you are analyzing and set up what you will say about it.  Effective writing for this step will inlude a focus relevant to the demands of the assignment  + provide background so that the reader can understand that focus.

You did a great job on the presentations.  Hopefully the in-class comments opened up both how to use this kind of pre-writing to develop an essay.

For the rhetorical analysis assignment, you will write an essay to meet the requirements stated on the assignment sheet.  If you look at the calendar, you will see that you have for credit assignments for most of the steps in the process you practiced in the group work.

We spent the last part of class pre-viewing Pollan and Orbach, the essays you will analyze for the Rhetorical Analysis assignment.

For next class:
Read: either Orbach or Pollan
Write: steps 2-5 (see above, and the last blog post) for either Orback or Pollan.  Post this writing to the Analysis page on your portfolio.


Have a great weekend.