Improving Commentary

What we got Assertion: Your topic sentence/ what you’re attempting to prove. This should include whatever rhetorical strategy on which you are focusing and how it connects to the abstract idea in the prompt. Evidence: the actual example of the rhetorical strategy. You should make heavy use of paraphrase in order to shorten quotes as much as possible Commentary: Here’s where you explain how the evidence illustrates your assertion. This is usually done by describing a.) how it effects the reader (considering the rhetorical triangle) and how it connects back to the abstract idea in the prompt.

How we can modify this Assertion: Same as before Evidence: Just one example of that rhetorical strategy in action Specific Commentary: Explaining how this specific example works Evidence: Another example of that rhetorical strategy in action Specific Commentary: Another explanation of how this specific example works General Commentary: An explanation in general of how that rhetorical strategy work throughout the piece (Induction) Connective Commentary: An explicit explanation of how this rhetorical strategy proves your assertion.

Prompt What rhetorical strategies does Woolf use to characterize the struggle women face?

Example Assertion: Woolf employs understatement in order to satirize the difficulty women have faced in pioneering their own roles in male dominated professions. Example 1: For example, when introducing herself in paragraph 1, Woolf humorously concedes, “It is true I am a woman” Specific Commentary 1: The audience is fully cognizant of Woof’s gender; thus, this announcement is not for the sake of informing her audience but rather to establish ethos with an audience who have most likely also faced the obstacles of professional patriarchy. Certainly, the audience has come to see more than just “a woman”, but rather to see a woman who has thrived and flourished in a field dominated by men.

Example (continued) Example 2: Later in that same paragraph, Woolf again uses understatement, this time to make light of her own accomplishments, writing that the “road was cut many years ago” by other women authors before her “making the path smooth”. Specific Commentary 2: Though her audience would certainly have great respect for the great pioneers she mentioned (Austen and Eliot to name a few) they would also certainly realize that Woolf’s ingenuity and effort had much to do with her success as a writer and that it was most definitely not a“smooth” “path”.

Example (continued) General Commentary: In both examples, Woolf uses understatement to inject humor into a daunting subject, a wry but poignant joke that she shares with her audience; (Connective Commentary) at the same time, she uses it as an opportunity to remind the audience of the difficult road they face as women in the professional world by satirizing her own struggles in the writing professional.

We do Assertion: Woolf uses parallel structure to….