Mid-Term Exam Topic
For a PDF version of this topic, please click here.
Choose a song that you feel is rhetorical. Discuss the rhetorical situation: exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints, and whether or not you feel it is a fitting and effective response. Your answer should be an essay of around fifteen hundred words, with a definite thesis and conclusion. Please attach the lyrics as an appendix.
I ask that you do not use selections of classical or religious music in your selection: the former will be too esoteric, the latter too obvious. Please type your response, include a word count (if you don't know how to do this, type "word count" into the help menu of your word processor), and hand it in on Wednesday at the beginning of class.
Course Assignments & Details
Overview
For papers and presentations, your grade will be based upon a rubric discussed in class, based upon the criteria established by the assignment sheet and those that you should expect (as juniors) by this point in your academic career. For detailed information about each project, you should visit and download the appropriate assignment sheets.
Project Folders - While working on each project, you will be asked to bring drafts, paragraphs, outlines, etc. to class in your project folder. Each project will have its own folder: all materials you gather, including all notes and all drafts (peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed), must be handed in with the final draft of each assignment in the project folder. Failure to hand in any of the associated materials will result in loss of points.
Unless otherwise specified, your papers should follow standard MLA style, using 1 inch margins on all sides, 1/2 inch margins for headers and footnotes, 12 point serif font (Times New Roman, Palatino, Garamond).
Projects
Note: information concerning the portfolio and class participation is available on the Homework page.
Report on a Discourse Community
Assignment Sheet (Web)
PDF Assignment Sheet
This assignment asks you to choose a discourse community (also known as an interpretive or rhetorical community) to give you practice in identifying the groups that will be at the heart of the rest of your writing projects. This first project asks you to identify a community and describe some of its features.
Dialogue
Assignment Sheet (Web)
PDF Assignment Sheet
This project will ask you to dramatize two of the perspectives related to your chosen issue. This dialogue will not be descriptive (the variety used to advance a story), but rather didactic. Didactic dialogue, which emphasizes ideas, is used as an end in itself in instruction, propaganda, and philosophical discourse: the participants may be imaginary characters, portrayals of real people, or portrayals of literary or historical characters that you associate with your issue.
Parody
Assignment Sheet (Web)
PDF Assignment Sheet
Ultimately, parody serves a critical function: it must first identify a characteristic stylistic habit or mannerism and then make it comically visible, rather than simply deconstructing it. Through this, it can serve both a normative critical function and as a contribution to stylistic evolution (Dentith). Parody works by juxtaposition, addition, omission, condensation, and disjunction of the original structure or content of the work it parodies. Unlike satire, parody must adopt certain features of its target as a part of itself.
This assignment asks you to parody a discursive artifact deriving from your chosen issue. It takes two parts. First, you will analyze the prose style of a figure who is deeply involved with your issue in a brief (750 word) essay, using the tools and ideas discussed in class from the readings. Second, you will write a 500-750 word parody of that style. Along with your two-part essay, you will submit a sample of the prose you are holding up to parodic criticism.
Repurposing an Argument
Assignment Sheet (Web)
PDF Assignment Sheet
You will use concepts from class to briefly analyze an artifact from your political issue, criticize it, and then rewrite it for a specific audience (identified in the introduction to your rewrite). The purpose of these papers is not editorial, that is, I do not want you to “correct” the artifact; rather, you are to use the papers to demonstrate your understanding of rhetorical appeals by generating an “alternative” edition of the original artifact that is aimed at a different audience.