Essay

Writing Project 5: The Rhetorical Analysis

Purpose

· In this assignment, you will analyze the rhetorical situation of a non-commercial organizational website, explore how its rhetorical elements interact, and evaluate the overall success of the website’s purpose based on your analysis. The website can be any of the following:

· ●  a university website

· ●  a charity or other nonprofit organization

· ●  a community website

· ●  a club or special interest group website The purpose of this assignment is to understand how the multiple analyses built into rhetorical analysis build to an overall analysis and evaluation of a communicative act’s success; specifically, the goal of this project is to understand how successful an organization is in achieving their website’s purpose given the rhetorical situation of that website. Skills and Outcomes

· ●  Recognizing the overall purpose of a website. (Rhetorical Knowledge, Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing)

· ●  Recognizing the audience of a website and explaining how at least two specific elements of the website’s rhetorical situation lead to a particular invoked audience (Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing; Knowledge of Conventions)

· ●  Recognizing at least 3 relevant aspects of the website’s context (Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing)

· ●  Recognizing & explaining how at least 3 strategies work towards achieving the website’s purpose. (Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing; Knowledge of Conventions)

· ●  Critiquing the overall success of the website by explaining the seeming success or failure of the strategies used to achieve the purpose given the audience and context (Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing)

· ●  Differentiating and participating in different steps in the writing process to maximize its efficiency and efficacy in producing a polished project (Processes; Knowledge of Conventions)

· ●  Critiquing one’s work relative to the assignment rubric during review (Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing; Processes; Knowledge of Conventions)

· ●  Generating a meaningfully-multimodal text (Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing; Processes; Knowledge of Conventions) Tasks

· ●  Your writing project should articulate the overall purpose of the website under discussion.

· ●  Your rhetorical analysis should take a clear stance on who the invoked audience is, and it should explain - in detail - at least 2 ways the website you have chosen to analyze invokes a particular audience. Be sure to consider contextual elements like media and kairos, and also think about access: who is included, who is excluded, and how?

· ●  Your project should discuss at least 3 relevant aspects of the website’s context. How you determine relevance is up to you, but you should explain what contextual elements are relevant and how they are relevant. ​Note​: there may be some overlap between this criterion and the audience criterion of the assignment.

· ●  Your rhetorical analysis should explain at least 3 strategies that work towards achieving the website’s purpose, and this explanation should describe how any strategies you articulate are particular types of rhetorical appeals (to logos, pathos, or ethos). ​Note​: As you are looking for strategies, remember to look at things like images and colors used along with explicit text messages.

· ●  Your project should include a primary insight that makes a judgment about how successful the website is by explaining how successful the strategies are in achieving the website’s purpose with the invoked audience given the context.

· ●  Your project is written for an audience and should be written with an audience in mind: it should be organized in such a way that readers can follow your thinking from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph. This organization should lead your reader to your primary insight in a clear manner; in other words, your primary insight should help structure your project.

· ●  Since you are writing for a website (your ePortfolio site), you should include and integrate at least two multimodal elements. You could include pictures, sounds, or even hyperlinks to other websites; but you must make sure that your reader understands why you are including these elements. Consider what media might reinforce your primary insight, capture the rhetorical situation, and/or appeal to your readers in another way. Just do not forget to explicitly refer to that element and explain it to your readers.

●  Your project should be approximately 1500 and 2000 words in length.