Rhetorical Analysis

Rhetorical Analysis Guidelines
Instructions
A rhetorical analysis requires you to apply your critical reading skills in order to “break down” a text. In essence, you break off the “parts” from the “whole” of the piece you’re analyzing. For example, you will analyze particular elements of the story, like the author\’s purpose and tone, and discuss why the author is making these intentional choices (i.e. why does Manning use descriptive and direct language? what effect does using this type of language have on the reader?). The goal of a rhetorical analysis is to articulate HOW the author writes, rather than WHAT they actually wrote. Thus, a rhetorical analysis is NOT a summary of the story.

Choose one of the following to critically read and write a rhetorical analysis on:

\”Black Men and Public Space\” by Brent Staples (139)
\”Football Matters\” by Paul Theroux (246)
\”Find Your Beach\” by Zadie Smith (253)
\”But What Do You Mean?\” by Deborah Tannen (283)
When analyzing one of the primary texts listed above, use details from the corresponding \”on Writing\” section to support your analysis and add evidence:

\”Zadie Smith on Writing\” (260) (see below)

Next, use the Rhetorical Analysis Worksheet as a guide to writing your paper. The worksheet is a pre-writing activity that can then be used to create a rough draft. See “Paper Structure” below for additional tips on how to arrange your draft using the worksheet.

Secondary sources are optional (no more than 4 sources); acceptable sources are articles, ebooks, and videos found on the EFSC library database, and print sources (i.e. our textbook). No sources from websites, unless approved by instructor. Refer to the LibGuide for a resource and email me with any questions.

Note: the Similarity/Originality Report must be 25% or less (meaning that at least 75% of your essay must be your original words/thoughts/ideas).

Paper Evaluation
This is a very focused assignment and you will be evaluated on the depth of your analysis. You will be graded on whether you meet the minimum length of the assignment (minimum of 3 full pages), your objective tone, and how well you analyze how the author writes. You will also be graded on grammar, punctuation, spelling, and MLA format. This assignment requires you to cite in-text and provide the source information on a work(s) cited page. Use quotations when language is especially vivid or expressive, when it is important to let the debaters of an issue explain their positions in their own words, and when the language of a source is the topic of your discussion (citation). You can also summarize text information, but make sure you give credit to the source! All summaries, paraphrases, and direct quotations must be cited in-text. Use A Writer\’s Reference or Purdue OWL (Links to an external site.) for help citing. For additional help check out our course LibGuide and chat/email/meet in person with a librarian. In addition, I am available to help you with writing and formatting your draft.

Paper Structure
Introduction: Introduce your topic and story/author. Identify the author’s main idea and why the author chose this thesis, or idea to study.
Transitions: Clear and logical transitions between the introduction, body, and conclusion. Without logical progression of thought, the reader is unable to follow the essay’s analysis, and the structure will collapse. Transitions should wrap up the idea from the previous section and introduce the idea that is to follow in the next section.
Body Paragraphs: Use the worksheet to analyze the parts of the story (i.e. what is the author’s purpose, why does the author choose this purpose, and what effect does it create? Who is the intended audience and why does the author choose to write for this particular audience? What diction does the writer use, why, and what effect does this create?).
Evidential support: the essay requires well-researched, accurate, detailed, and current information from the story to support the thesis statement. Some factual, logical, statistical, or anecdotal evidence should support the thesis. Cite evidence in MLA format (parenthetical citations in the essay and a work cited page).
Conclusion: DO NOT RESTATE THE THESIS. DO NOT introduce any new information into the conclusion; rather, synthesize the information presented in the body of the essay.

MLA formatting must be used! Refer to A Writer\’s Reference handbook for help with citations. If you use the primary source, the story, you will use the citation format for \”One selection from an anthology or a collection\” on page 442 in the handbook. If you cite other text from the anthology, including the biographical info that appears before the story, you must cite that as well. This would be cited as another \”selection\” from the anthology with the editors as the authors. See \”Two or more selections from an anthology or a collection\” (442-3) for details. If you use another secondary source (i.e. an article from the database), you will need to cite that accordingly. The handbook provides citation guides for online sources, starting on page 431.

SPORTS AND LEISURE
ZADIE SMITH
Born in London to an English father and a Jamaican mother in 1975, Zadie Smith is a literary star whose sharply contemporary and “drop-dead cool” novels have won her critical acclaim and a devoted following. Her bestselling debut, White Teeth (2000), drafted while Smith was an undergraduate student at Cambridge University, won the Whitbread Award for best novel, was the basis of a BBC television miniseries in 2002, and was adapted for the stage by London’s Kiln Theater in 2018. Smith’s other novels, which tend to look at intersections of race, class, gender, and nationality with a heavy dose of humor, include On Beauty (2005), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; NW (2012), named by Time magazine as one of the ten best fiction books of the year; and Swing Time (2016), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. Smith is also a regular contributor of literary and cultural criticism to the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books; her essays have been collected in Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018). An elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a tenured professor in New York University’s creative writing program, she splits her time between New York City and London.

Find Your Beach
In this essay from Feel Free, Smith turns her critical eye to an advertisement painted on a building facing her New York apartment. Like Paul Theroux in the previous essay, Smith finds a source of comfort in a singular aspect of popular culture. “Find Your Beach” first appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2014 and was selected for Best American Essays 2015.

Across the way from our apartment — on Houston,6 I guess — there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year. Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold Martinis.

The wall of the building on the right shows an image of a beer bottle, with a foreground text that reads, Find your beach.

Before that came an ad so high end I couldn’t tell what it was for. There was no text — or none that I could see — and the visual was of a yellow firebird set upon a background of hellish red. It seemed a gnomic message, deliberately placed to drive a sleepless woman mad. Once, staring at it with a newborn in my arms, I saw another mother, in the tower opposite, holding her baby. It was 4 a.m. We stood there at our respective windows, separated by a hundred feet of expensive New York air.

The tower I live in is university accommodation; so is the tower opposite. The idea occurred that it was quite likely that the woman at the window also wrote books for a living, and, like me, was not writing anything right now. Maybe she was considering anti-depressants. Maybe she was already on them. It was hard to tell. Certainly she had no way of viewing the ad in question, not without opening her window, jumping, and turning as she fell. I was her view. I was the ad for what she already had.

But that was all some time ago. Now the ad says: “Find your beach.” The bottle of beer — it’s an ad for beer — is very yellow and the background luxury-holiday-blue. It seems to me uniquely well placed, like a piece of commissioned public art in perfect sympathy with its urban site. The tone is pure Manhattan. Echoes can be found in the personal-growth section of the bookshop (“Find your happy”), and in exercise classes (“Find your soul”), and in the therapist’s office (“Find your self”). I find it significant that there exists a more expansive, national version of this ad that runs in magazines, and on television.

In those cases photographic images are used, and the beach is real and seen in full. Sometimes the tag line is expanded, too: “When life gives you limes … Find your beach.” But the wall I see from my window marks the entrance to Soho, a district that is home to media moguls, entertainment lawyers, every variety of celebrity, some students, as well as a vanishingly small subset of rent-controlled artists and academics.

Collectively we, the people of SoHo, consider ourselves pretty sophisticated consumers of media. You can’t put a cheesy ad like that past us. And so the ad has been reduced to its essence — a yellow undulation against a field of blue — and painted directly on to the wall, in a bright Pop Art style. The mad men know that we know the SoHo being referenced here: the SoHo of Roy Lichtenstein7 and Ivan Karp,8 the SoHo that came before Foot Locker, Sephora, Prada,9 frozen yogurt. That SoHo no longer exists, of course, but it’s part of the reason we’re all here, crowded on this narrow strip of a narrow island. Whoever placed this ad knows us well.

Find your beach. The construction is odd. A faintly threatening mixture of imperative and possessive forms, the transformation of a noun into a state of mind. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. On the one hand it means, simply, “Go out and discover what makes you happy.” Pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do. And it’s an ad for beer, which makes you happy in the special way of all intoxicants, by reshaping reality around a sensation you alone are having. So, even more precisely, the ad means: “Go have a beer and let it make you happy.” Nothing strange there. Except beer used to be sold on the dream of communal fun: have a beer with a buddy, or lots of buddies. People crowded the frame, laughing and smiling. It was a lie about alcohol — as this ad is a lie about alcohol — but it was a different kind of lie, a wide-framed lie, including other people.

Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if — as in the case of this wall painting — it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty.

SAMPLE SOLUTION

Find Your Beach by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is a renowned literary star whose writing focuses on race, religion, and culture. Her writing is characteristic of eccentric characters, savvy humor, and snappy dialogue. Her short story “Find Your Beach” is an exciting description of how one can enjoy the life they desire to live by a simple redirection of their mindsets. Zadie uses the story to express her belief that if people redirect their mindsets to a more limited perspective and use the limitless Manhattan mentality | PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW AT writtask.com |ses the beach to describe a mentality, and she finds her beach by coming to peace with Manhattan’s beach. The idea of one’s “beach” is hard to discover but then it can be observed through the author’s personal background, as it is…