Write a 1200 word rhetorical analysis of either James Boyce’s “The Environmental Cost of Inequality” or Ben Ehrenreich’s “Suicide Prevention: Why We Must Do Everything Differntly to Ensure the Planets Survivial.”
Your goal in this analysis is to make an overall argument about how successfully or not the author makes his argument by evaluating his appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos.
Your thesis will be a clear statement about the rhetorical success or quality of the overall article. Remember that a good thesis has two parts (what/why, claim/reason, focus/purpose). Your thesis for this essay needs to make a clear evaluative point about the article’s overall rhetorical success or failure and offer a statement that sums up how and/or why you think this point is true.
For example, “In ‘The Environmental Cost of Inequality’ James Boyce create strong appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos because he carefully uses reliable sources to create a convincing argument about how the people who are least affected by climate change are the ones who are the biggest cause of it.” The “what” part of this thesis is everything before the “because” and the “why” part is everything after it. Because you may find some of an author’s appeals to be effective and others to not be, your thesis might praise the effectiveness of some appeals and criticize others. As a result, your thesis may end up being more than one sentence. It could be as many as three sentences, one each for ethos, pathos, logos.
Remember, however, that a good thesis needs to be part of an introduction that provides the context needed for it to refer to specific ideas. See below for more information on introductions.
The first body paragraph of your essay should offer an overview of the article’s thesis and main points (a brief summary). This should be no more than a half page. Your second body paragraph should analyze the article contextually and consider when and where the article was published, who the author is and her/his credentials, who the intended audience likely is and why, and any other broad considerations that help establish the context of the article and your reading of it. This paragraph might be more than a half page, but not much more. In presenting both the summary and the contextual analysis remember that your purpose is to frame and inform your rhetorical analysis. That is, you’re not presenting this information simply for the sake of it. Instead, you’re trying to set up and outline the major points you make in the rest of your paper.
The remainder of your essay will be made up of examples of how the author appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos in exact detail. Each paragraph should focus on one specific example and show how it is making a specific sort of appeal successfully or not. The specific example you evaluate needs to be carefully chosen to be a meaningful and useful example of the way the author constructs the overall text that can be directly related back to your specific thesis. Don’t just choose examples at random.
You want to evaluate parts of the text that are representative of the way the author makes rhetorical appeals throughout the article. This means that the examples you choose and how you evaluate them determine what your thesis will say. For example, if you evaluate the author’s appeals to logos as being sloppy and unconvincing, then your thesis will have to reflect that. Something like, “The appeals to logos are ineffectual because they make unsubstantiated assumptions.” Choose the examples you analyze carefully. Don’t just randomly pick arguments to evaluate simply because you found them.
Your analysis will need to consider ethos, logos, and pathos at least once each. You may evaluate each example you consider in terms of only one type of appeal or you may consider each example for two types of appeals or even for all three depending on the specific example you are working with.
Since this is a formal essay it is on the closed end of the writing spectrum. That means that you must have a clear introduction and thesis statement. Typically, introductions perform the following functions (although not necessarily in this order):
1) get the reader into the text
- A “hook,” although this implies something clever or cute which often is a bad idea. Just get the paper started by moving your reader from the chaos that is the world to the order that is your paper.
2) define terms relative to your argument
- You may not have any terms to define, in which case don’t offer any definition. You need to think about what you might reasonably expect your reader to know. If there are any terms you’re using in a way specific to your point you’ll want your reader to understand how you’re going to use the term right away. This doesn’t mean to offer a dictionary definition of a word or idea. The best way to define your use of a term is by using it in a brief example.
3) provide background and context
- Name the text you’re writing about, it’s author, and any other important information to frame your paper. You’ll want to name the article and something about where and when it was published and name the author and something about the author’s credentials. You will also want to offer a very brief statement of what the article is about. If you include a summary of the article as your first body paragraph this should only be a sentence in your intro. If you are not including a summary as your first body paragraph you should offer three or four sentences as an overview of what the article is about.
4) forecast structure
- This is a road map of your main points. We don’t need a list of the major ideas you’re going to present, but we should have a pretty good sense of the ideas you’re going to work with to support your thesis and a sense of how they relate to one another. Generally, you won’t know what these are until you’ve written at least one, and probably several, drafts. Once you have the basic main points figured out, go back to your introduction and sum them up in a couple sentences to give your readers an idea of your overall point.
5) thesis statement
- Thesis statements usually consist of two parts, a claim and a reason, or a what and a why, or a focus and a purpose. Usually, thesis statements work best near the end of the introduction because they then have the rest of intro. to give them context. Also, you want your reader to go into the body of your paper with a clear sense of the main idea you’re going to be working on so placing your thesis near the end of your intro. makes it the last idea the reader gets.