Start early and finish early. Try to choose your text well before
the April 8 deadline, and let me know (in writing) what you have
selected. Compose a rough draft (or parts of a rough draft) well before April
27, and let me have a look at it so that I have time to respond to your draft and offer
suggestions. And try to complete the final version of your paper before the
deadline of May 1. Don't drive yourself crazy by
trying to write a concise, thoughtful, and well-organized rhetorical analysis at the same
time you're supposed to be studying for final examinations. (Oh, well, at least I
warned you.)
IV. Revising and Editing the Final Paper
A few more things to keep in mind as you move from "squeezing" your text and
drafting your paper to composing a clear, concise final version of the report:
Below you will find (1) an example of the required format;
(2) guidelines for word processing the final version of your rhetorical analysis; (3)
additional tips on developing, illustrating, and organizing your observations in a
coherent essay; (4) a few final do's and don'ts. In addition, please consider
this copy of the grade sheet
that I'll be using when I evaluate your essays. I'll also be giving you some
sample passages (draft versions and revisions) from previous student papers.
Your Name
Rhetoric (Nordquist)
Date Submitted
Title of Your Essay
Your essay begins right here
(no separate title page). Essay should be word processed
(and clearly and sharply printed) in a standard 12-point
font. Double space all text. Set one-inch
margins: top, bottom, left, and right. Follow
current MLA style guidelines (MLA Style Manual
and Guide to Publishing) if you're an English
major, APA guidelines otherwise. Know how to
punctuate quotations (hint: in the United States, commas and periods go inside
quotations), and
know how to underline or italicize a word referred to as a word.
Make sure that your rhetorical analysis maintains a clear
focus throughout. In other words,
don't simply catalog all the devices that you've found. As you work on revising your
draft, cut
out anything obvious, repetitious, or purpose-less. In your introduction, immediately
attend to
the work you are about to analyze: no need to offer general commentary about the
nature of
rhetorical analysis or the life of the author or the hard work you put into composing
the paper.
Never quote a passage without commenting on what you perceive to be the significance
of
the passage. Make sure that your individual observations are clearly connected and
that your
rhetorical analysis adds up to something: insights that are conventionally drawn
together in a sharp
conclusion. No essay will be marked down for exceeding the recommended page length as
long as every word in the essay matters.
In most cases, this assignment does not call for
research beyond a close rhetorical analysis of
the text at hand. In other words, unless you've chosen to analyze an historical
document, it's
unlikely that secondary sources will be necessary. However, if for some reason you
feel that you
must rely on a secondary source (say, to clarify the rhetorical situation at the start of
your paper),
be sure to cite that source following MLA or APA conventions. Failure to cite
secondary sources
of any kind will be considered a violation of the AASU Honor Code.
Don't complain about your choice of text, especially if you
failed to carry out the
rudimentary analysis recommended above before you announced your topic. No
one, by the
way, has ever failed this assignment because they picked a "poor" or
"inadequate" or
excessively complex text; students have failed, however, because they ignored the
assignment
guidelines, failed to take advantage of my offers to review drafts, got a late start,
and/or spent
more time worrying than working.
Don’t waste time in needless summary or paraphrase.
Don’t overwork the word use or the
verb to be. Avoid the vague pronoun this if it is not followed by
a clear, specific noun after it (e.g., NOT
"This shows . . . " BUT INSTEAD "This figure . . . " or "This
passage . . . "). Keep in mind that
you are writing your essay for a peer who (1) knows the meanings of all of our rhetorical
terms
(definitions not needed), and (2) who has read the text you are analyzing (no summaries
needed).
Keep quotations brief (i.e., less than a line, whenever possible). To avoid lengthy
quotations,
(1) use ellipses ("The beginning . . . to the end"); (2) refer to line and/or
stanza and/or paragraph
numbers (which you will have marked clearly on the text attached to your essay).
Don’t wrap your essay in plastic. Number the pages of
your essay. Clip or staple the pages
together, attach a copy of the text you are analyzing, and slide the materials into a
9" x 12"
envelope with your name on the outside. Absolutely no later than 6:00 p.m. on
Thursday, May 1,
drop the envelope or folder into the appropriate box on the counter in Solms 211.
You’re done.
_________________________________________________
V. More Tips on Revising and Editing the
Final Paper
NOTE: I originally composed the following tips a few years ago after reading
several rough drafts for this assignment. The advice remains sound.
A few quick late-night thoughts after reading (rather than
drinking) several drafts:
(1) Deadwood and repetition tend to distract from an analysis: as you revise
be prepared to reduce clauses to phrases and phrases to words--and then cut needless
words.
(2) Don't forget the value of topic sentences (in this assignment,
sentences that clearly identify the key rhetorical strategies you're considering in each
of your paragraphs); opening sentences that either summarize the text or identify a minor
device (alliteration!) tend to get get the paragraph off to a vague,
dispiriting start.
(3) If every paragraph begins with something like, "In Kinky Friedman's next
paragraph, he uses . . . " you're probably not connecting points adequately--and
you're certainly wasting words.
(4) After finishing your draft, take a red pen and underline the word "use" every time it appears: then try recasting your
sentences more directly without that tiresome verb. (Once you've identified Kinky,
for instance, as the author of your text, his name hardly needs to appear again.)
(5) If you've reached this ripe old age and still haven't learned how Americans (as
opposed to Brits) use commas and periods with quotations, please go to THIS PAGE NOW and
learn the conventions; otherwise your essay will fail horribly, your dog will die, and
your garden will never grow.
(6) About turning our rhetorical terms into adjectives, here are a few of the more
common ones: alliterative, ambiguous, analogous, anaphoric, anticlimactic,
antithetical, assonant, asyndetic, copiousness, encomiastic, enthymemic. epimonic,
ethical, euphemistic, euphuistic, figurative, hyberbolic, hypotactic, ironic, isocolonic,
metaphorical, metonymic, onomatopoetic, oxymoronic, paradoxical, punning (not
paranomasiatic), paratactic, parenthetical, pathetic, polysyndetic, proverbial,
rhetorical, and stylistic.
NOW . . . go check here for a critique of
a student paragraph written on Alice Walker's
"Am I Blue?" . . . and try applying some of the suggestions to your own draft.
Cheers.
_________________________________________________
VI. TRY IT AGAIN: Some of the Same Tips on
Revising and Editing the Final Paper--but Worded Differently This Time
A few more quick late-night thoughts after reading
several more drafts.
(1) Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do when revising a paper is to give yourself a night off so that you can later review your drafts
(remember to read aloud) with fresh eyes and ears.
(2) An introductory paragraph (one is plenty) should
let us know the name and author of the text you're examining, a clue that you're about to
embark on a rhetorical analysis of that text, and a suggestion re. the purpose and/or
value of conducting such an analysis of that particular text. Then get down to
business.
(3) One of the major problems with deadwood (i.e.,
words with little or no nutritional value--to mix a metaphor) is that it distracts from
(at times even obscures) some of the best ideas in an essay. Almost everything
(including this page) could be markedly improved through judicious (make that ruthless--slash
and burn) editing. A few examples from papers in front of me (with thanks to
the authors):
(a) Instead of
writing, "The author's use of zeugma in line one is . . ." say simply, "The
zeugma in line one . . .." See meditation below on the abuse of
"use."
(b) If you hear yourself writing about
"authorial authority as the author creates himself as a character," you should
recognize at least one "author" too many before you plunge down Alice's
rabbit hole. Try instead, "The first six words project an ethos of authority .
. .." (Invented ethos, remember, emerges from words. )
(c) If you feel a recurrent impulse to refer to "the reader" throughout your essay, resist with all your
might. The pronoun "we" can save acres of deadwood.
(d) "That" and
"which" clauses can be deadly. Here's the before-editing version:
"The metaphor that is created with the phrase 'I had suffered a sea change' . .
."; here's the after-editing version: "The 'sea change' metaphor . .
.." Sweet and simple, right?
(e) A few phrases you can go
through life without ever using again: instead of "in order to" write
"to"; instead of "the reason . . . is because" write
"because"; and instead of "due to the fact that" write
"because."
(f) In a rhetorical analysis, the word
"word" is often redundant: e.g., instead of "the metonymy of the
word 'eye' . . . ," just say "the metonymy of 'eye' . . ." and instead of
"the assonance of the word 'heliotrope' . . ." try "the assonance of
'heliotrope' . . .." Remember: putting a word in quotation marks indicates that
you're talking about the word as a word.
(g) The world just might be a better (or at least more
sensible) place if we agreed not to use "this"
without a noun immediately after it. Otherwise, "this" is confusing.
