However, before you can write and research about your inquiries and in order to understand the academic disciplines in which you will write, you must analyze the choices other writers make so that you understand the effect of those choices upon audience members. To begin this learning process, you will analyze the rhetorical strategies of another author. You will NOT argue the issue; you will analyze the relative effectiveness of a researched, peer-reviewed essay by examining how the author uses rhetorical appeals (like logos, pathos, and ethos), language, argumentative fallacies, counter arguments, evidence, and so on. Nuts and Bolts: You are to choose a peer-reviewed article or essay that contains and incorporates research that relates to a topic of your choosing. The article or essay that you choose must be one that has been peer-reviewed. Instead of arguing the issue that the author presents, you will argue the overall effectiveness of the author’s rhetorical choices. One temptation in this assignment will be to grab the first article or essay you see that is in any way interesting to you. You will find it TAMIU FYWP ENGL 1301 2 more productive to “read around” in different types of publications. You will need to formulate a thesis that makes sense of your observations and that claims something revelatory about the article you are analyzing. Use the invention exercises to work beyond a laundry list of textual features and toward an explication of the reasons behind those features. Your audience for this essay will be your 1301 classmates, and your purpose for this essay is to communicate the relative effectiveness of a published article to your classmates as a way of educating your classmates on the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of rhetorical choices published authors make. The analysis is to be 1,200-1,500 words and should include specific, cited examples from the source text in MLA format. In addition, your essay should be written with an eye toward academic tone, voice, and Standard American English. In addition, your essay should be free of most grammatical and mechanical errors. Features of the Rhetorical Analysis Genre: This final essay asks you to reveal how effective a published, peer-reviewed article is in persuading readers to accept the author’s (or authors’) answers to research questions. This third essay should completely omit your personal perspective—you need to omit the personal pronouns “I” and “we” and so on. The first-person perspective should not be used to say things such as, “I analyzed this article, and this is what I found.” Furthermore, your perspective on this essay will be evident in the ideas that you present; thus, you do not need to say it with the pronouns. In addition, this essay, like most other essays, omits the direct address to the reader by removing the “you” in the essay. The use of the pronoun “you” can be very offensive to your reader, and we need to work to remove it from our writing. This essay asks you to create a thesis statement, one that guides your readers through your ideas in your essay. Your introduction should hook the readers into wanting to read your essay, and should briefly summarize the article you are analyzing. In order to move away from the standard, high-school five-paragraph format of an essay, you will need to construct your thesis statement so that it does not simply list the three things that you will discuss in your essay. Instead, this thesis statement should reveal the rhetorical effectiveness of your article while you learn to construct your thesis statement so that it does not simply list your ideas. Then, each paragraph provides an explanation and evidence from the article to support that thesis statement. A few reminders about paragraph structure: 1. You should have a topic sentence that includes a transition and overviews the focus of the paragraph as it connects to your thesis. 2. You should then expand on your thesis, describing how this idea furthers your thesis. 3. Give examples to which the audience can relate. 4. Synthesize your outside sources with your ideas (examples from the article). 5. Discuss how the examples from the article help you demonstrate the sub-point. 6. Finish the paragraph with a sentence that connects the sub-point back to your thesis. Finally, your conclusion should answer the following three questions: 1. Did I do what I said I would do? In other words, did you present enough evidence to support the argument that you made? This is more than a mere recitation of your thesis. 2. Why is this important? This question moves your ideas beyond our classroom walls. What is the significance of your argument? 3. What do you want readers to do with this information? You are the expert on this area and you need to tell readers what they should do with the knowledge that you have given them. Things to keep in mind while analyzing your chosen article: TAMIU FYWP ENGL 1301 3 What is the author’s purpose? How does the author attempt to succeed at his/her purpose? Who is the author’s intended audience? How do you know? How does this impact the rhetorical choices the author employs? What rhetorical choices has the author made that work? Which ones do not? Why? How does the author use logos, pathos, and ethos? Is their use of these rhetorical strategies effective? Why or why not? What kind of language does the author use? Is the language specific to the people in the field of study (in other words, is the language considered jargon)? Is this use of language effective for the intended audience? Remember that you may or may not be the intended audience. Does the author use any rhetorical fallacies? If so, are they effective?MLA format, font 12 ” Double Space, Time Roman