11.25 Reflective writing and conferences

Reflective writing on Rhetorical analysis.  The assignment for the reflective writing on the rhetorical analysis essay is posted to the right.  This assignment is not due until the end of the unit when the reflective essay and all other writing is due: Thursday, December 4.   We went over it in class today to give you a heads up so you could get started on the assignment + ask questions, and to point out that starting work on this writing could be part of a step-by-step process for deciding how to revise your drafts.

Plan for what to revise for the Rhetorical analysis:  You will notice that point 9 on the blog post for what to include in the rhetorical analysis unit is your plan for revision for the analytic essay (based on comments in conference 11.25).   This writing will be due with the rest of the writing for the unit, on December 4.

What we will do on Tuesday December 2.
You will have an in-class work day on Tuesday, December 2.  During this time you will have an opportunity for one more round of feedback on your rhetorical analysis essays, and anything else you want to work on.

Good work today, and have a great holiday!

11.20 Rhetorical analysis drafts : working on finding a thesis, organization + development

Conferences:  Wenscent, Austin, Lulu, Erika, Shanice, Taffy, Jessica, Sabrina, Terrell, Vinson, Jesse, Kevin, Khizer, Jaqwetta, Doreen,


What to post for the analysis unit.   See previous post.

Finding a thesis for this assignment:
From the discussion of Brainstorming 1, we noted that the proposed thesis did a great job of including all the elements that this essay needs.

The proposed thesis was: Orbach essay's was really successful in stating her purpose to her audience. She makes moves of using ethos, logos and pathos for her essay. She makes various points to support her essy.

While this thesis may not have the rhetorical elements in the right order and it definitely needs to be stated in specific terms, it does have "placeholder" statements to cover each of the areas the assignment sheet requires you to discuss.  It sets up:

• the author and (name of) the essay
• it takes a position regarding the essay's effectiveness; 
• it has a placeholder for a statement about the particular audience + purpose;
• it has a placeholder statement for evaluating the rhetorical elements (ethos, pathos, logos, the organization + content ) 

Process for revision rough drafts.
1. Identify and strengthen the thesis statement.  In our discussions of the drafts, we began by noting the thesis.  The thesis wasn't always stated completely in the introduction => this is typical for rough drafts.  So our work was to figure out and state the "best" thesis.  We did this by noting the points raised in the essay's body and by paying attention to the conclusion.  In first drafts, the REAL thesis is often in the conclusion.

2. Map out the points you want to make in your essay.  Start out by listing all the points you want to make, and then think about the "best order".  A kind of "template' organization for this assignment is listed below.  Remember that this is "approximate" and that your organization should reflect the rhetorical needs of your particular argument.

3. Go to the text to find examples to support your  points.

4. Incorporate your changes into the draft.

General map for the rhetorical analysis essay.
1. introduction = name article + author, discuss content, + rhetorical features=> state your position on the essay's effectiveness

The rest of the essay will discuss + develop the points you set up in the introduction.

2. discussion of audience + purpose (so that you can show how the organization, ethos, pathos, & logos connect to them)

3. discuss overall organization [with emphasis on how the "work" for the audience + purpose]

4,5,6. dicussion of ethos, logos + pathos [the order will depend on your focus and how these features work in your essay] => be sure to develop a discussion of how & why each feature works for the audience & purpose of your essay.

7.  conclusion

This outline is a list to map out the organization.  It does NOT state the number of paragraphs that should be in your essay.  Each discussion may take one or more paragraphs, depending on how many examples you have to illustrate the discussion, and how many points you want to make in that discussion.

For next class:
Post your revised drafts to the Analytic essay page.

At the beginning of class I will present the reflective writing assignment/prompt for planing for revision for the analysis essay.   The rest of class will be workshop and one-on-one conferences on the revised drafts.   If you post your revised draft by Sunday night, I will be able to prepare for your conference.  Individuals who post their essays by Sunday night will be scheduled first.  If you don't have a draft posted by class Tuesday, we can have a brainstorming talk, but these will be scheduled after all conferences on posted drafts.

The schedule for one-on-one conferences will be posted on Monday night.

Have a good weekend!

What to post for the analysis unit

(10 assignments)
1. rhetorical analysis of zinczenko (same steps we developed in class for Warner)
2. group scripts to parallel Obama's rhetorical moves (posted as google.doc link)
3. list of "moves" Haygood makes in his essay (similar to the analysis we developed as a whole class for Obama)
4. group rhetorical analysis of haygood + practice essay (google.doc) 
5. rhetorical analysis of the audience, purpose, form (ethos, pathos & logos) for either Pollan or Orbach (due 11.18) 
6. a thesis and a list of points (posted at the end of class, 11.18)
7. rough, rough draft for in-class workshop, (due 11.20)
8. revised draft analysis essay 
9. plan for revision for analytic essay (based on comments in conference 11.25)
10. reflective writig on analytic essay

AND: final draft (this is the draft you will receive a grade on)

11.18 Finding a thesis for the rhetorical analysis assignment

During the first part of class you did some group work to flesh out your analysis of the essay you chose for the Rhetorical analysis assignment.  The purpose of this work was for you to nail down your claims about how the essay worked in terms of its audience, purpose, and form (the way it used logos, pathos, and ethos).  

We listed the audience, purpose, and the form of the appeals to ethos, logos and pathos for the Orback essay on the board.

Audience: feminists in the 70's, people who bought Orbach's book (this essay is from her book on Fat is a Feminist Issue).  Beliefs and values of this audience connecte to increasing attention to the ways dominant political and social structures limited women's freedom.  Feminist issues centered on equal opportunity (in terms of access to jobs, schools, and "identities"), reproductive rights, equal pay.  

Purpose: we had two different opinions here:

to inform:  to provide feminist readers with "talking points" for an argument on why fat is a feminist issues.  That way they would all be on the same page, as feminists, about the the feminist stand on "fat"

to persuade: to convince mainstream feminists that in addition to reproductive rights, equal pay, and equal opportunity issues => "fat" was also a feminist issue.  That the "mainstream" view on fat (that it was an individual control issue) was in reality a cultural issue, and that because women were put in a position to "market" themselves as sexual objects, being fat was (in some ways) about rebelling against an oppressive set of cultural beliefs. 

ethos/pathos/logos . . . you had a range of different interpretations as to how Orbach resorted to these. 

Finding a focus.

The second half of class was about identifying a thesis that would satisfy the requirements of the assignment.  We reviewed the assignment sheet and noted that the requirement for the focus of the essay is to "evaluate the effectiveness" of the essay you are writing about in terms of the audience, purpose, and form (its use of ethos, logos + pathos).  

This means that your thesis statement for this essay will be about how well (or whether) the essay "works" (in terms of the author's choices about how to use of ethos, logos & pathos) to achieve its purpose with its designated audience.

After you identified a thesis, you went back to your analysis of the essay, and to the essay itself, to identify a series of points you could make to "prove" your statement about whether the essay used rhetoric effectively, or not.  

Once you had your list of points, you identified specific examples from the essay which you could use as evidence to support those points.  

In theory, you composed a thesis and a list of points by the end of class, and posted that writing to your portfolio page. 

For next class:

Write: a rough, rough draft for your rhetorical analysis essay.  This can be very drafty   The most important parts for you to work on are: 

• making sure you have a focus (thesis)that works for the assignment; 
• identifying relevant "background" material (about the audience, purpose, general form etc) which you will need to set up before you begin to "prove" your claim about how the essay works; 
• setting up (and beginning to develop) a series of points where you "show" how the essay uses ethos, pathos, and logos + relate what you show back to your thesis (state whether these moves are effective or not.

In class, we will identify the kinds of feedback most needed to help writers meet the genre requirments, focus, organization, and development criteria for this essay.  Then, as a class, we will review some of the drafts you have developed so far.

Individuals who have agreed to have their essays used as "examples" include: Jesse, Jessie, Kevin, Sabrina, Erica, Lulu and Austin. 

Good luck on your drafts and see you on Thursday!

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.

11.11 Rhetorical analysis assignment= process

We started class with a review of what we have done so far to set up for this assignment.

Rhetorical Analysis:

• We defined rhetoric.
• We studied the forms + moves in persuasive writing (including ethos, pathos + logos) => writing designed to get someone to think about/understand/agree with an argument.
• We defined analysis + identified the steps in analysis.
• We analyzed essays from the fast food readings, noticing the sequence and relationships of the different moves the author used within an essay (paragraph by paragraph, section by section analysis).   We analyzed the essays in terms of audience, purpose, form and the rhetorical appeals.
• You worked in groups to analyze Obama's talk, and then constructed a talk which used parallel moves.

So that brings us to where we are now.  You should understand what rhetoric, its different moves, and how to analyze them.

Practice Rhetorical Analysis Project.
We then looked at the assignment sheet for project 2 (posted to the right), and identified what you need to do to complete the assignment.  

The purpose of the practice rhetorical analysis assignment is to give you a chance working through a process for writing a rhetorical analysis before tackling Project 2.

 Process for developing a rhetorical analysis

1. Read essay

2. Analyze moves (make a map of what the essay does like we did for the Obama essay)

3. Describe the audience

You can figure out who the audience is by anlayzing the publication where the essay appeared.  Pay particular attention to features of the audience which are relevant to the topic of the essay.

4. Identify purpose

Purpose can be inferred from the text itself, the author's identity, and from scanning other essays the author has written

5. Spend some time gathering examples of ethos, pathos & logos moves in the essay

6.  List the points you would make about this essay

Map or organize what you will say

7. Write paragraphs/sections for your points

8. Try out different ways to organize your essay by dropping the sections you wrote into the "list" /map (this is a rough/rough draft)

9. Write the intro

10.  Go back to the essay and revise/reorganize=> post the Draft Rhetorical Analysis of Haygood

For next class:
Write: Complete your group rhetorical analysis of the Haygood essay; your group should post writing for each of the steps, including 10, where you are requestions to post a Draft essay.

On Thursday, as a whole class exercise, we will review and provide feedback for revising each group's essay. Then we will go back and point out the steps in the process that will contribute to strengthening the draft.

11.6 Presentations using the rhetorical structure of M. Obama's talk

Grades:  If you want to add missing work for the persuasive unig, or if you had work posted that I didn't see or was mislabled, make yourself a note of it, and post a notice on the landing page of the portfolio, and I will add the points when I assess the course as a whole (at the end of the analytic unit).

If you have make up work for the summary response unit, it is due by class November 11.


Work on Analytic presentations.
Today you worked in-class on your presentations using the rhetorical structure of the Obama talk.
1. Doreen, Austin, Vinson, Wenscent: (audience= senior citizens, older people group (AARP?); argument:  smart phones are important to 21st century communication and here is a plan for integrating them into your life)
2. Taffy, Jess, Sha, Lulu  (audience = young people who use social media; argument: cyberbullying has become pervasive, and here is a plan for all of us to work on stopping it)
3. Erica, JaQuetta, Jesse, Damian  (audience= students at Kean; argument: here is what we can do to ensure that the parking situation gets better)
4. Terrell, Sabrina, Khizer, Kevin:  audience= individuals who communicate extensively with phones; argument: cell phones are changing the quality of our relationships, and here is a plan to change your everyday communication patterns)



Something to think about:  http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/05/health/healthy-restaurant-choices/index.html

For next class:
Read: Haygood, 406

Write:  list the “moves” Haygood makes in his essay, post this list to your portfolio

11.4 Rhetorical analysis of Obama speech

Grade so far.  Each of you should have received an email with a grade so far.  At the beginning of class I talked over patterns in the writing process and products from your portfolios.  I also pointed out that while earlier grade so far numbers weighed more heavily in terms of participation points, as we move towards the end of the semester, the grade will shift to reflect more of the quality (graded writing).  That means that if your grade is on the border, and you are counting on participation points to keep it at the higher grade, you will need to work harder on getting higher marks on the graded writing.

Also, as stated in class last week,  I called your attention to the fact that if you want to change scores for the summary/response unit, you need to turn in missing work + revisions before class next Tuesday, November 11.  I have looked at all additional/re-posted work noted on the homepage of the portfolios I just graded.  If you have additional work you would like considered, send me an email with a link to your portfolio, and a specific list of what you want me to consider.

 I will not re-grade work from the summary response unit turned in after November 11.

Work on Rhetorical analysis.
We spent most of the rest of class working on a detailed analysis of Obama's speech to the NAACP in terms of the content & rhetorical moves she made, paragraph by paragraph, and move by move.  Below is a copy of our observations from that discussion.

1. opening
thanks  (par1-6) thanks individuals (members of organization=> =connect to her target audience, first)

building connections to the audience (par 7-10) discusses history of organization + its audience; pay attention to her use of "we" and "you" => "we" emphasizes connection, "you" acknowledges the work + accomplishments of the group

setting up focus in general (11-14)  charges the group with "more to do" to achieve equality + good lives => for our children (introduces focus on children)

setting up focus in terms of health + obesity + kids(15-19)  problem with obsesity for kids = important the way they feel = health risks

re-state focus in terms of organization's interests (20-21) African American community + the work of the NAACP

2. body of argument
i. first point of argument (25-42)= the culture of activity and eating is different for kids today than it was for us

her generation/ AA culture in terms of activity (25-30) use of "we" => connects to group
her generation/ culture of eating (31-36) use of "we"
what it is like for kids (then AA kids) in terms of activity and eating (37-42)

ii. second point (43 -47 ) these changes are resulting in health issues, connects to NAACP's agenda

iii. Obama's agenda => (48-74) what she proposes to do about these problems (her agenda)

Let's move program
(48-50) defines objectives
(51) identifies partners/stakeholders (interested parties)
(53-74) sets up the 4 components of the program (orients the audience to what she will say) and then discusses them one by one :  the general pattern she uses to discuss each component is to state what the component does, give an example, describe the legislation associated with the component's objectives, identify partners, and transition to the next component.

For the fourth component, she gave much more background material (proof) that this last component was necessary (so if you have a point that your audience won't understand or connect to => give background)

(75-86) sets forward ways to change at the individual level, she moves from general statements to specific examples, then a transition .  covers let's cook, breast feeding + WIC  (3 ways individuals can act + government helps)

87 need to look at our own habits
88 set examples
89-91 community examples
92 transition to conclusion

iv  Conclusion
94-104 connects back to NAACp history (you can do this because you have done this kind of work many times before => a series of examples)
105  Final appeal for Obama's agenda

Map of Obama's moves
1. Opening:  connects to audience through thanking group for their attention to her, using we, acknowledging group's accomplishments, setting up focus in general way, connecting general focus to the group's agenda.  Comparison of "us" (generation/group seeking to address the problem) and "them" (generation with the problem) as transition to set up her agenda for solving the problem.

2. Body:  sets up her agenda in a general way, then in a specific way.
i. Let's Move.
defines plan, breaks into components (sets up overall argument => tells how many points)
in the description of individual components, she describes each component in terms of what it does, how it connects to her actions (government), how to and who can support her actions; transition to next component.  She gives history (additional persuasive facts/context) for any point that might be difficult for the audience to understand.

ii. individual and community actions.

3. Conclusion
connects back to group's agenda, identity + history
restates her request for action.

Assignment for next class.
For the last part of class, you divided into groups to choose and audience and a purpose for an argument you would make to the class in the form of a presentation.  Your argument's purpose + audience should be chosen so that they "fit" with the form of Obama's argument.

Groups + their (so far) audience + argument:
1. Doreen, Austin, Vinson, Wenscent: (audience= senior citizens, older people group (AARP?); argument:  smart phones are important to 21st century communication and here is a plan for integrating them into your life)
2. Taffy, Jess, Sha, Lulu  (audience = young people who use social media; argument: cyberbullying has become pervasive, and here is a plan for all of us to work on stopping it)
3. Erica, JaQuetta, Jesse, Damian  (audience= students at Kean; argument: here is what we can do to ensure that the parking situation gets better)
4. Terrell, Sabrina, Khizer, Kevin:  audience= individuals who communicate extensively with phones; argument: cell phones are changing the quality of our relationships, and here is a plan to change your everyday communication patterns)

For next class:  Each group will write a script for a speech, addressed to their chosen audience, to persuade them of their "agenda", using the form or moves in the order set forward in Michelle Obama's talk to the NAACP.

In class, you created a google.doc (drive) document through your Kean account, and invited everyone in your group as a contributor (so they can 'write" in the page).

During the first part of class, you will be able to "polish"/go over the script.  During the second part of class, you will "perform" your scripts.  All group members should have a role for the performance (we will talk about this in class).