Rhetorical Analysis
Audience: First-year college students majoring in sociology, psychology, communications, or English
In this assignment, you will build on your analytical skills (both in reading and in writing) by rhetorically analyzing one of the works listed below. Your rhetorical analysis should help you: 1) understand more fully the challenges and decisions facing those who endeavor to persuade a particular audience through their writing; 2) read the written works of others more carefully and critically.
In order to be strong and effective, your analysis will need to accomplish at least three objectives: 1) to analyze what your chosen writer is trying to achieve-that is, how/what he wants his readers to think/feel; 2) to analyze how your chosen writer uses various rhetorical elements to persuade his or her audience to think or feel a certain way; 2) to evaluate the degree of rhetorical success the writer has in achieving his goals.
Rhetorically analyze one of the following:
- Solomon Asch's "Opinions and Social Pressure"
- Stanley Milgram's "The Perils of Obedience"
- Jerry Burger's "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?
- Philip Zimbardo's "Stanford Prison Experiment"
o NOTE: Zimbardo has reshaped his original article for The New York Times Magazine into the essay that runs for eight pages on the Stanford Prison Experiment website. If you choose to write about Zimbardo's report, focus only on the essay-do not include graphic or video/audio components.
You may use Ian Parker's "Obedience" essay also, but only as supplementary material in support or elaboration of your rhetorical analysis of one of the four essays bulleted above. (Parker's "Obedience" essay was first published in the online magazine Granta, issue 71, 2000, pages 99-126.)
To assist you in completing the assignment, keep in mind elements like the following*:
- Your author's background and credentials
- The context of the text's original publication: date, place, publisher (to recover information about a publication's purpose, intended audience and perspective, Google its title and, on the publication's home page, look for an "about us" section and/or "mission statement" for the publication, both of which are usually listed at the top or bottom of the home page
- The nature of the audience to whom the work was originally addressed
- Support for position: logic, evidence or examples, statistics or other facts (in considering this element, also take into account for whom the author was originally writing)
- Appeals to the audience's emotions, reason, and/or ethics
- Language: level and type of vocabulary, choice of words, subjective or objective language
- Organization of the essay
- What the writer chooses to include/elaborate on and what the writer seems to ignore or pay little attention to
- Sentence structure and length
*By no means is the preceding a complete list of the kinds of rhetorical elements writers use. At the same time, by no means must your paper cover all of these elements or every rhetorical device in your chosen essay. Choose what strikes you as most relevant to your thesis. Regardless, however, this paper-by its very nature-requires you to quote from your chosen essay rather extensively-on average, you should include at least one direct quotation from your chosen essay per page.
Try to find a thesis that has relevance for you. The following are examples only:
- Stanley Milgram's gift for story-telling, as evidenced in his account of his obedience experiments for Harper's, demonstrates his ability to persuade readers of the shocking and important nature of his discoveries.
- In the account of his experiment, Phillip Zimbardo writes to persuade readers and viewers of his website The Stanford Prison Experiment to believe certain roles we are assigned are so strong that even experimenters can lose sight of what is real and what is not.
- You might also think about comparing and contrasting the style, context and purpose of Burger's article-the only scholarly article in the unit-with the style, context, and purpose of one of the three other essays in our unit recounting obedience experiments.
Length: 4-5 pages, paper formatted using MLA style