1. Lesson 3: Rhetorical Analysis Overview & Peer Evaluation
I can analyze a text for rhetorical elements and explain how they assist the author in achieving his purpose.
I can evaluate my own and my peer’s writing for textual understanding, organization and development, syntax, word choice, and grammar.

2. Agenda Bell Ringer: Sentence Types
Overview of the Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Rhetorical Analysis: Breaking down the prompt
Rhetorical Analysis Suggestions
Class Discussion
Self Evaluation
Peer Evaluation

3. Overview: Rhetorical Analysis Essay
You will be presented with a prose passage that can be drawn from various genres and time periods. The specifics of the task vary from year to year; however, they generally involve to analysis of language, including rhetorical strategies and stylistic element.
Purpose:
Tests your capability to read, understand, and analyze challenging texts
Assesses how well you manipulate language to communicate your written analysis of a specific topic to a mature audience.
AP is looking for connections between your analysis and the passage.

4. Rhetorical Analysis
To analyze a text rhetorically, we have to consider 2 things as we read: intention and effect.
Intention: The goal the author wants to accomplish by producing the piece of rhetoric.
To define an issue
To reflect on the importance of something
To persuade the audience to do something
To evaluate the truth of a claim or another’s argument
To explain/inform about an issue/topic/event
To clarify difficult material

5. Rhetorical Analysis
To analyze a text rhetorically, we have to consider 2 things as we read: intention and effect.
Effect: How certain choices made by the author contribute to the intention
Diction
Rhetorical appeals
Rhetorical devices
Style
Tone/Mood
Syntax

6. Deconstructing the prompt
Read the prompt carefully, including all introductory information.
Circle or underline the essential terms and elements in the prompt.
To understand the rhetorical situation:
Rhetorical Triangle/SOAPS (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject)
Purpose is the most important thing to understand because it is the author’s intention.
Look for hints of specific rhetorical strategies in the prompt (these are not always given).
The strategies you are looking for in the prompt and as you annotate the text are the effect.
Identify the specific task the prompt asks you to address.
This usually has to do with how the author achieves his/her purpose.

7. Breaking Down the Prompt
Rhetorical Analysis Prompt:
Read the passage below carefully. Write a well-organized essay that evaluates the elements of rhetoric and style found in the passage. Explain how the writer uses these elements to communicate with his audience and to achieve his purpose.
What are the key words in the passage?
There are always two parts to a rhetorical analysis – what are they?

8. Rhetorical Analysis Suggestions
The following are points you might have chosen to include in your essay on Faulkner’s speech to the graduating class.
Consider them as you complete your peer-evaluation.

9. Rhetorical Situation:
Form or Mode: Prose; a speech in first person point of view
Speaker: William Faulkner, American author and novelist
Audience: Graduating high school students
Subject: Good versus evil
Purpose: To persuade members of the graduating class that individuals can and must choose to change the world for the better.
Textual evidence: “It is man himself, created in the image of God so that he shall have the power and the will to choose right from wrong, and so be able to save himself because he is worth saving.”
Context: Speech given at graduation ceremony for University High School in Oxford, Mississippi (May 1951) – We know that at this time WWII has ended and the atom bomb is a threat that the entire world is now considering how to deal with

10. Premises of Faulkner’s argument:
Youth has the power to rid the world of war and injustices.
People fear the danger in the world today (dictators, war, the atom bomb, etc.).
There is danger in those who use human fear to control humankind.
It is the individual’s right and duty to choose justice, courage, sacrifice, compassion.
If people choose the right actions, tyrants will disappear.

11. Diction/Syntax/Style Analysis
Uses second person (“you”) to speak directly to the audience – pathos
Uses long, complex sentences
Parallel Structure
“giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for”
Style: Cadence ministerial, almost musical
Word choice is sophisticated but comprehensible
“Glib,” “Baffled,” “Aggrandizement”

12. Diction/Syntax/Style Analysis
Anaphora
“Our danger is not that. Our danger is the forces in the world…”
Polysyndeton
“…the economies or ideologies or political systems, communist or socialist or democratic…the tyrants and the politicians, America or European or Asiatic…”
“…courage and endurance and sacrifice”
Juxtaposition or Antithesis
“…justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, pity and self…”
“…who will believe always not only in the right of man to be free of injustice and rapacity and deception, but the duty and responsibility of man to see that justice and truth and compassion are done.”

13. Class Discussion
What other elements of rhetoric and style did you find?

14. Self Evaluation
Complete a self-evaluation of your rhetorical analysis essay

15. Peer Evaluation Trade papers with a peer.
Read each other’s papers and then score it using the peer evaluation rubric.
Give the essay an overall score and explain it in the rationale section. Make sure to give your partner at least one thing to work on before their next essay!

16. Conference with your Peer
Discuss each other’s paper. Make sure to ask clarifying questions and recognize what your partner did well on as well as what they can improve on.