LAE6392

PROJECT TWO Option Two—Visibility and Rhetoric and Comparison/Contrast—Social and Political “Discussions” in Multi-Media Contexts

Project Overview:

This project encourages close, comparative rhetorical analysis of two texts—these texts should arise from a specific text of social protest and/or from the public political sphere and must contain both VISUAL and TEXTUAL rhetoric.  While social and political rhetoric are often similar; audience, purpose, and methods often differ.

The word text connotes ANYTHING THAT CAN BE INTERPRETED.  This includes political protests, recorded speeches, cartoons, political debates, videos, newscasts, music, printed materials in all forms, and pretty much any text of social unrest or political persuasion that attempts to send forth an effective message to a willing (or sometimes unwilling) audience of listeners/viewers with words, motions, sounds, visual images, tone, and other details that comprise a rhetorical situation.  This project encourages the analysis of multi-media texts and secondary use of research. 

There are two catches:  

1.       The texts you choose must be connected to the realms of political arguments and/or arguments based in social unrest.  You may choose to compare a text of political rhetoric to social rhetoric, or you may compare two social texts, or two political texts.

2.     The texts you choose must make use of both written and visual rhetorical strategies.

This paper should have several parts:

1.       An introduction to the two texts that you will compare/contrast and an argumentative statement (thesis) to guide your reader through the main points of the essay in the order in which these main ideas arise.  The comparisons and contrasts that you make about the rhetorical methods of your texts comprise an argument that you have to defend, support, prove, and surround with elements of research as well.

2.     A careful, thoughtful, supportive, researched comparison/contrast of:

a.      Rhetorical Methods (appeals to ethos, pathos, logos, use of kairos . . . and so much more; the images and media of the text are important to your analysis)

b.     Purpose (what do the visual and textual strategies in these messages aim to do?)

c.      Audience (who do these messages aim to persuade?)

3.     A conclusion that states and defends which text is likely to be most successful for its audience and why.  Further, you need to make another kind of evaluative judgment here—which text SHOULD BE SUCCESSFUL and why . . . which message, regardless of its success or failure, contains the greatest reflection of public NEED.  That is, equipped with an understanding of the audiences of both of your texts, state and defend the message which better reflects, according to your analysis, “good” rather than “evil.”  ~ This SYNTHESIS represents the next step from Project One, where you make use of ALL that you have learned regarding rhetorical analysis in order to shape your own and your audience’s understanding of what they should believe regarding the issue debated within your two texts.

BE SELECTIVE in both your texts and your main ideas.  Some texts will lend themselves more readily to comparison/contrast than others.  Further, in terms of main ideas, you need not cover every aspect of the rhetorical triangle, but you do need to develop your main ideas for both texts that you compare/contrast and you need to discuss the visual nature of the text (and its medium) as well.  So, you can write your entire paper on just the use of pathos, its purpose, its place in the visual and aural delivery of the argument, and its possible impact on an audience of listeners/viewers; but you must be able to develop this in full for both texts that you compare/contrast.  In fact, I recommend as much focus as you can possibly muster, as this will make for a much more concise and focused analysis.

AUDIENCE:

Consider YOUR audience to be an informed, aware, and speculative group of scholars, an academic audience who already knows what rhetoric is and how it should function.  It is your job to drive an effective comparative rhetorical analysis from there.

VOICE, TONE, and PERSONA: 

Academic, informed, analytical voice. Avoid colloquialisms, contractions and excessive numbers of personal pronouns.

LENGTH, FORMAT, and DESIGN: 

1000 to 1500 words academic paper with a Works Cited page. Make sure to use proper MLA format. USE Times New Roman 12 point font, double spaced, with one inch margins…You should follow MLA formatting when documenting any outside sources. Per the MLA, the page number and your Last Name should be in the upper right hand corner of EVERY page…If these simple requirements are not met, you will lose points.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIES:

As usual, you must construct an annotated bibliography for this project.  This time, we must differentiate between primary and secondary sources.

Primary sources—these are the two texts that you analyze.  These texts must be either texts of social protest or political argument and they should offer a visible/aural element for analysis (or you may choose to compare a social protest text to an argumentative political text).  Choose your texts based both on personal interest and on the nature of this assignment.  I would like to see the annotations for your primary sources as soon as you decide on your texts.

Secondary sources—the possibilities here are vast.  Since each of you will construct very different projects, your goal is to find ACADEMIC sources that work well for your focus.  If you want your analysis to hinge on logical and emotional appeals, then research in this realm.  If you would like to construct a focus based on the impact of setting or rhetorical situation (kairos, timing, space, surrounding events, responses, cultural climate), or of you decide to explore the use of ethos (who the authors are [or purport to be], how the authors gain [or destroy] trust and respect, how the audience connects to the authors [or fail to]), then your research should go in this direction.  SELECT A FOCUS AND CONDUCT RESEARCH BASED ON THE NATURE OF YOUR PRIMARY TEXTS AND THEIR VISUAL, AURAL AND TEXTUAL RHETORICAL QUALITIES.  DO NOT RESEARCH, FOR INSTANCE MARTIN LUTHER KING’S LIFE AND CAREER; INSTEAD RESEARCH HOW LOGIC, ALLUSIONS, AND SETTING IMPACT AUDIENCE AND TEXT (SINCE THESE ARE SOME OF HIS SPEECH’S STRENGTHS).  This is not an arbitrary choice; different social and political arguments will wield different rhetorical methods, different points of audibility and visibility, and have different purposes and audiences.  Try to reserve your secondary research for what you need to know in order to support your comparison/contrast and your conclusions.  

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