Write a three- to five-page rhetorical analysis of the essay “Sweatshops Still Make Your Clothes,” by Jake Blumgart.
Pre-writing:
Your rhetorical analysis assignment is to read and annotate the Jake Blumgart’s article from
Salon.com, “Sweatshops Still Make Your Clothes.” You should use highlighting, underlining, color coding, marks of punctuation, including question marks. This should show how to actively read.
Note
:
Pages may vary based on the edition of the textbook you are using.
Practical Argument
models annotation methods, a rather superficial one on p. 62-4 and a longer more detailed one on p. 65-7.
You next need to think about and to gather the bits of information you’ll need to write a rhetorical analysis of the essay, “Sweatshops Are Still Making Your Clothes.” The paper will include notes that you take. The notes should be based on the checklist for the rhetorical analysis on p. 102.
You should briefly answer all of relevant questions in the checklist; you can handwrite or type out answers it doesn’t matter. To answer these questions you’ll need to read the parts of Chapter 4.
The paper itself will come out of these notes. Not all of the questions will be equally important for the essay I’ve assigned. (For example, you may not find metaphors or parallelism used).
In gathering the information, you are looking to find what makes this essay work well as an argument. Your thesis will address how well (or not) the article makes a persuasive case for itself.
Critical thinking is a core part of academic arguments. The rhetorical situation of an essay helps to see why it works, or not. Start by pre-reading the essay, skimming it, and then looking up information about the author, and the place the essay was published. Those are some of the parts of the “Rhetorical Situation” (p. 92). These are also parts of the rhetorical essay.
Prepare a series of answers for the most important (to you) questions.
Use the template for the paper on p. 108-9 to write a preliminary outline for the paper.
Writing:
You start by gathering the information. Answer the checklist questions on p. 102 titled “Preparing to Write a Rhetorical Analysis.”
- Your introduction should give background; you may decide what background is necessary for the reader to follow your analysis.
- Consideration of the rhetorical situation is important, and should probably be done in the first section.
- You should touch on the use of ethos, pathos, and logos in the essay
- Consideration of the author’s refutation of the opposing argument is also important to include in the body.
- Other effective or ineffective strategies that the author uses that do not neatly fit into our rhetorical terminology is also OK to discuss in common-sense terms.
- The conclusion should make an overall evaluation of the effectiveness of the essay you are analyzing. The point is not whether you agree with the argument or not; it is how effective the argument is at persuading the reader.
Note: Read an example of a rhetorical analysis on Dana Thomas’ essay “Terror’s Purse Strings.” (p. 103 – 106). The model paper, “A Powerful Call to Action,” by Deniz Bilgutay is what your paper will look like.