Article Review-
Purpose: Analyze the rhetorical situation and evaluate the effectiveness of a text.
This first project gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of such rhetorical concepts as purpose, audience, appeals, and exigence, as well as their interrelationships. You will go one step further and assess how successful a writer's choices are based on his/her audience and purpose. In other words, you will engage in a rhetorical reading of the selected article and reach a conclusion regarding its overall rhetorical effectiveness given its intended audience) and purpose.
You can think of this project as one responding to these questions:
- Do the author's rhetorical choices and strategies yield a strong, convincing argument? A weak one?
- Which point(s) do you want to make about the author's rhetorical choices?
Article - "The Only Good Reason to Ban Steroids in Baseball: To Prevent an Arms Race" by Jacob Beck, The Atlantic, June 17, 3012.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/06/the-only-good-reason-to-ban-steroids-in-baseball-to-prevent-an-arms-race/276932/
Read the article/essay you review at least twice. As you read, complete the previewing work you did for class by answering the following questions (based on Bunn and BBG):
i. Do you know the author's purpose for this piece of writing?
ii. Do you know who the intended audience is for this piece of writing?
iii. Given the intended audience and purpose, how effective is the language the author uses? Is it too formal? Too informal? Perfectly appropriate? Provide specific examples in support of your answers.
iv. What kinds of evidence does the author use to support his/her claims? Does he/she use statistics? Quotes from famous people? Personal anecdotes or personal stories? Does he/she cite books or articles? Provide specific references to the text.
Given the genre of the text, how appropriate or effective is this evidence? Would a different type of evidence, or some combination of evidence, be more effective?
v. A writer's ability to appear as a trustworthy and credible source, is essential in persuasive writing. Which techniques does the author use to develop his/her ethos? Back up your answer with evidence from the text.
vi. How does the author move from one idea to another in the writing? Are the transitions between the ideas effective? How else might he/she have transitioned between ideas instead?