Rhetorical Description of Family
(600-900 words)
Total Point Value: 100 Points
Why You're Doing This: You're doing this to develop an understanding of how to make a description-based argument-something you'll likely need to do in future writing in your discipline and profession.
What you're Doing: "Family" has an array of meanings. People have the families into which they were born, work families, school families. Are any of these more real than biological bloodlines? How does our society view the idea of family?. For this assignment, think about the myth of family vs. your reality and write a rhetorical description of your family experience, meaning a story that uses rhetorical strategies-namely pathos-to show the meaning or significance of the experience. You're writing this story for an audience that might read your piece in a magazine that publishes narrative writing (e.g. The New Yorker), and, inevitably, you're writing for an audience of your classmates, your instructor, and the readers of your e-portfolio.
Your goal in this assignment is to describe the experience in such a way so as to persuade a particular view of it, but you shouldn't at any point come out and state the view that you have or that you want your readers to have. Description is often if not always an act of persuasion, and in this case, you must be especially strategic in your description: show everything instead of telling / explaining anything. Decide what elements of the experience you want to highlight, reveal, and/or emphasize. In other words, shape the experience's meaning through vivid detail and careful attention to discourse as rhetorical.
To write the best possible rhetorical description, you might...
· Begin in medias res.
· Provide a sense of character.
· Provide a sense of setting/scene.
· Provide dialogue, if applicable.
· Slow down time. In other words, really limit the scope of what you're writing about, perhaps even to just one or two minutes of an experience given the required length of this assignment.
· Leave your reader with something to wonder about at the end / conclude in medias res.
· Consider whether you want to repeat a word for emphasis to develop a theme or motif.
· Write in a unique and memorable style.
· Have a point about the family experience, and, if you'd like, have a point about something else, but don't ever come out and explain your point. Instead, allow your readers to infer it.
You'll likely find the rhetorical descriptions we discuss in class to be useful in thinking about what shape you want your own review to take. To understand my values as a grader of this assignment, see the rubric for major essays that appears earlier in this syllabus, but don't worry about MLA Style as a criteria. You needn't cite anything for this assignment. Please submit your paper to the dropbox, Turn-It-In, and your e-Portfolio.