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PromptThe purpose of a rhetorical analysis is look carefully at others’ writing to evaluate the choices the author has made concerning how to present their ideas and arguments. How does the author chosen to present their argument? What rhetorical tactics have they used, and why? Students will examine the rhetorical situation, which involves considering details about the author, context, audience, and purpose for writing. For this assignment, you will choose one famous speech from a list that will be provided, and you will analyze how that speaker uses rhetorical appeals and argumentative strategies to achieve their goal. You will not either agree or disagree with the speaker’s goals or content. Instead you will focus exclusively on exploring and explaining how they achieve that goal and craft that content. The main focus of this analysis is to examine how an argument gets made, not what an argument is about. Put another way, you are looking at the craft of writing, not the content. We will learn the different ways that writers can frame their arguments and opinions, how their stylistic choices can affect a reader’s reception of their ideas, and how to spot fallacies in another’s writing (and avoid them in our own).Again, and I cannot stress this enough, you should NOT AGREE OR DISAGREE with your chosen source on any point. This is not the purpose of this assignment! Your final essay will make a clear and arguable claim about how the author’s rhetorical strategies and stylistic choices might create a certain effect on their audience. We will be discussing the three common rhetorical appeals of pathos, ethos, and logos, and your Rhetorical Analysis will make an argument about how your chosen speech uses one or more of these appeals, in conjunction with specific rhetorical tactics and techniques, to achieve a particular goal. Be sure

to pay attention to how small details can add up to impact how effective or ineffective the entire work is.You will need to quote, paraphrase, and summarize different parts of your source for this assignment. Especially when you quote, you will need to take care to fully engage with the author’s language and show the implications and effect of that language. You will learn when to quote and how best to analyze your chosen quotes in order to make your own argument about the author’s content. Direct quotations from your chosen speech will make up the bulk of your evidence, and so you must make sure to take the time to fully engage with and carefully explain the particular language and rhetorical tactics present in each quote.Do:Demonstrate a grasp of the author’s overall goalBe as specific as possible when describing your source’s tactics and techniquesExplain the specific historical context of your chosen speech somewhere in your introductionUse specific details, quotations, and examples from the essay to support your analysis, explaining how each example and quote supports the speaker’s overall goalIntroduce the speaker and, if applicable, the name of the speech somewhere in your introduction. After this point, simply refer to the speaker by their last nameUse a formal tone and try to avoid using first-person pronouns Don’t:Argue for or against the author’s argumentTry to discuss every argumentative tactic in your chosen textRely on extensive summaryFall into the “closest cliché” trap, where you reduce the full complexity of the speaker’s goals and language into a simplified and ultimately inaccurate banality (Ex. “In the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, King’s goal is for everyone to just get along.”State your thesis in the form of a question or as a quotation.Use secondary sources—this is not a research assignment