Background
Rhetorical analyses require writers to pick apart aspects of a text’s rhetorical situation to better understand
the purposes, goals, audiences, and themes of that text.
Questions you should ask in a rhetorical analysis include:
What is the situation for which this text was written?
What is the purpose of the text (what is it doing)? What is the goal of the text?
What is the message of the text (what does it say)?
Who is the audience or who are the audiences?
What strategies or methods does the author use to connect to the audience?
What are the logical (logos), emotional (pathos), ethical (ethos), and opportune moment (kairos) appeals?
What are the structural features of the text, and how do they affect the reading of the text?
What are the genre, medium, and technologies used for the text?
Task
Rhetorically analyze two scholarly writings that you might use for your draft of the Literacy and Language
Autobiography paper. AT LEAST ONE of these writings must be an assigned reading from the course thus
far in the semester. The other text can come from class or another peer-reviewed source. In your analysis,
use the questions discussed about, and you should aim for the following goals (evaluated on these):
Introduce and establish the arguments and sources from which they come
Provide the background information within a larger cultural context needed to understand the arguments
Analyze biases in each argument
Describe the claims made in each text
Identify the features of discourse used in the rhetoric
Analyze the logical (logos), emotional (pathos), ethical (ethos), and opportune moment (kairos) appeals
Explain the stance of each writer in detail
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