4.21 Brainstorming for analytic essay

To get started with this assignment - you needed to choose which essay you were going to analzye => the Warner or the Orbach.  We spent the first part of class talking about how to choose a reading which will allow you to write your best essay.  You identified a number of factors relevant to the essay you would choose for this assignment.

1.  How well you understood the authors ideas and moves.  In order to analyze the effectiveness, you have to understand what the essay does and how it does it.  If one essay was more clear to you, or if you had a stronger logical explanation for how one worked as opposed to the other - that might be a reason for choosing that essay.

2. Audience.  To write this essay you will need to understand the audience's values, beliefs and assumptions.  For eacho of these essays you might want to do a little research to make sure you know where and when the essay was published, and who reads that publication.  Depending on who you are, you might know more about one of those audiences.  Choosing the essay with the audience you are most familiar with (or have the most connection to) is another basis for choosing one essay over the other.

3. Length.  Shorter essays allow you to go deep, and provide less to deal with; longer essays provide more material.  So whehter you choose the short or the long essay depends on which way you want to go in terms of your analysis.

4. Which essay interested you the most?  Always important.

5.  Which essay allows you best to demonstrate what is demanded by the assignment?

After we talked about the assignment sheet, you then did some writing about which essay you would choose and why - and then you reported back to the class on what you wrote.

At that point you divided into groups, by essay, and mapped out the essay you chose to write about.  You used the following prompts to guide your writing.

Brainstorming for analytic essay.
This writing is your analysis of the essay you will write about.  It is a place to explore ideas.  Don't edit ideas out!  Put all your speculations/ideas about what is happening in each section (and why) on the page.

Break the essay into sections.  Sections should be groups of paragraphs directed at meeting a particular rhetorical purpose (setting up the "mood" for the discussion, characterizing the "other side"; establishing definitions, providing background, making a point, summing up what has been said so far + setting up the next section, etc).  We did this for the Obama talk, and for Balko.  This will give you a "map" of the essay's overall flow or the sequence of what it does (how it affects the audience).

Note the use of ethos, pathos, and logos, as well as the use of particular words and phrases to effect those moves.  (We did this in our discussion of Balko - like when we noted his use of the word "we").

Make sure everyone in your group has a link to this work, and that they can edit it.

More brainstorming - deciding what you will say.
Your essay needs to make a statement about the effectiveness of the essay you analyze.  This means you have to say what works (or not) and you must provide evidence for why/how it works (or not).

This brainstorming is the place where make a list of points you might make about your essay, along with the evidence you will use to develop a discussion of how that point works.  This is exactly what we did in class last week in our discussion of Balko.

Specifically, you were given time to:
1. Do a 10 minute freewrite about how your essay is effective and why.  For this writing - just get ideas out there, don't worry about proving them - go from your feelings for now.

2.  Make a list of the ideas/points you raised about how/whether your essay works.

For next class:
Write: 
1) Post the brainstorming we did in class to your portfolio;  This brainstorming should include: the writing about which essay you chose + why, a copy of the group document you created to analyze the moves in your essay, the freewriting, the list.  Paste all of this into a single document, label it 4.21brainstorming analysis, and attach it to your portfolio.

2) post a "draft so far" to your portfolio.

In class we will workshop the drafts-so-far and make a plans for finishing these essays.