NOTE FROM ME. ONLY USE THIS SOURCE BELOW AND MAKE THE PAPER IN SUPPORT OF THE ARTICLE. STATING THAT USING THE THREE ARISTILEAN METHODS OF APPEAL (ETHOS, LOGOS PATHOS) ALEXANDER IS ABLE TO CONVINCE HER AUDIENCE EFFECTIVELY
3-4 pages
A rhetorical analysis is an examination of the way a text persuades us of its point of view. It’s not a summary of the text. Rather, a rhetorical analysis identifies and analyzes the way a text gets its message across. As a writer, you will investigate what strategies the text employs “to connect to an audience, frame an issue, establish its stakes, make a particular claim, support it, and persuade the audience to accept the claim” (Jonah Willihnganz). Of course, you’ll begin your analysis by briefly summarizing the text—its argument—but most of the essay will show how the text persuades us of its stance. You might focus on certain techniques at play in different parts of the text, and then show how they function together as a whole.
Assignment: Write a rhetorical analysis of Michelle Alexander’s essay, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
Cover Letter
Once again, attach a short cover letter at the end of your essay and after any works cited that discusses the following:
• Your main points
• How you went about writing the essay and what happened
• Which parts of the essay you are most and least satisfied with
• Questions you have for me as your reader
Suggestions for the writing process:
First, describe as fully as possible for yourself what you take to be the general meaning/message of the piece. Do the same for more specific, particular claims. Then begin your examination of the piece’s strategies by looking at whether/how the work signals in any way its audience, purpose, and context. Begin with what the works do for you—that is, start with your experience and account for the effect you describe and how they are produced.
Second, identify the most prominent strategies the work uses to produce the meaning/effect you have described. Use terms and concepts we have discussed in class—the Aristotelian forms of appeal, metaphor, metonymy, analogy, common ground, etc—and any others that seem useful. Look in particular for any patterns that are developed by the work. Finally, decide what seem to be the most important elements of the work for you—that is, identify what is for you to be the most striking, meaningful effect(s) of the work and methods used to achieve it/them. This will help you hone in on a thesis.
Third, craft a few sentences that explain why, in your view, the piece works the way it does. Try to craft these sentences so that they set up, first, a description of what the meaning/effect of the piece is, and, second, what strategies, elements, etc. help produce that meaning/effect. Then isolate the textual evidence you will use—probably only a portion of what you have noted.
Fourth, write the draft. Make sure you give us your thesis or an indication of your thesis early. (You can give us the whole argument right up front, pose a question you’ll explore, the answer to which will be your thesis, or give us a general version of your thesis that you’ll refine for us by the end of your essay.) However, since you are writing not for a teacher but to interest and then convince your classmates about something, abandon the traditional, academic 5-paragraph form (thesis, 3 or so points of evidence, recapitulation of thesis). In its place, try to write a narrative of your analysis—you might use phrase such as “when I/one first encounters. . .” “what is striking about. . .” “I/one realizes, begins to recognize. . .” Take us on the journey of your own discovery, a discovery that is expressed as a claim about the works under consideration.

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