OVERVIEW:
For this assignment, you'll craft an email to someone whose behavior you'd like to change in some way. Examples of potential recipients include your mother, your best friend, or one of your professors, to name just a few examples. What's important in this assignment is that you use rhetorical strategies in order to persuade the person to whom you're writing to change his/her behavior. In conjunction with your email, you'll write up a 700-1000 word academic analysis, in which you make a case for why your email is an effective piece of rhetoric, supporting your argument with reference to the rhetorical concepts we discuss in class and by pointing to specific text from your own email.
The purpose of this assignment is for you to practice your communication skills by being attentive to the rhetorical situation, ethos, pathos, logos, presence, identification, etc... as you create a real-world message and then reflect on your rhetorical activities. This is not a research project and YOU SHOULD NOT CITE ANY RESEARCH.
You will complete and turn in your project in two stages.
RHETORIC ONLINE DRAFT
This should include a draft of your email together with your analysis of it. While the email can be written in an informal style, the analysis should be composed in the style of a formal academic paper. It should include:
1. An introduction in which you state your thesis and give a brief overview of the topic. Avoid an overly long introduction; the bulk of your analysis should consider the rhetorical dimensions of your email.
2. An account of how your email is rhetorically successful given the rhetorical situation and its component parts. Your analysis should point to specific features of your email.
3. An explanation of the persuasive strategies you used. You should be specific in your account of how you used these strategies, again pointing to particular features of your email.