English Essay Help

ESSAY 2: RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

In Chapter 5 of Now You See It, Cathy Davidson delves further into her earlier claims about the educational value of digital game-based learning. For your midterm writing, you have analyzed the rhetorical moves she makes to convince her audience to accept her argument. Similarly, for Essay 2, you will analyze the rhetorical moves of Nicholas Carr in “The Crisis in Higher Education.” This text is an essay that explores the potential value and consequences of MOOCs (massive open online courses), but what is he really trying to argue? And why does he choose his particular style of writing for his particular audience? Read the text slowly and closely, and focus your annotations on identifying and labeling the author’s rhetorical

moves. Then, consider his strategy and decide whether or not you think it was effective. For your second major writing assignment, you will put the principles of rhetoric you’ve been studying to work. You will be writing a rhetorical analysis e s s a y , so it is your job to say something meaningful about the way the author has constructed his or her argument. To write an in-depth rhetorical analysis essay, you will use the terms from Inquiry (Chapters 2, 3, and 8) to help you break down the text into its various components, and then you will show how these parts relate to the whole. Your essay should respond to the following question: How does Carr’s awareness of his audience shape his rhetorical decisions? A successful essay will use these terms (when and where applicable) to analyze the text:

! Rhetor ! Audience ! Situation ! Purpose ! Genre ! Style (diction, tone) ! Claims (of fact, value, policy)

! Support (recent? reliable? accurate?) ! Concessions ! Counterargument ! Ethos ! Pathos ! Logos ! Logical Fallacies

Essay Requirements:

! a relevant introduction that leads to your thesis ! body paragraphs organized by point ! appropriate textual evidence to support your points (quotes, paraphrase, summary) ! ample analysis ! a conclusion ! formal academic prose ! MLA format, in-text citations (please use the PDF page numbers), and a Work(s) Cited page ! 5-6 pages

See Insight for Due Dates!