I like the idea of moving rhetorical analysis away from a formal "paper" structure and having the process broken down in smaller writing exercises. I have had similar feelings about my own rhetorical analysis paper assignment being inauthentic, and this is how I will be handling it this year:
1. I have found that doing group exercises using advertisements in class is a fun and less tedious way to practice analytical skills--students can still get feedback from me and each other, but I'm not sitting at my computer for hours doing that. I feel like they are still learning how the process works this way.
2. I am also thinking about making rhetorical analysis a part of the peer review process when students evaluate each others' writing. This way, they are practicing this skill in a meaningful context, but it's not necessarily something I have to "grade" and respond to.
3. I am a fan of John Warner's writing assignments in his book The Writer's Practice. He has several different analytical writing assignments which feel a bit more genuine and interesting than the typical rhetorical analysis paper. One asks students to analyze a commercial and identify the subtext, and another asks students to identify what makes a particular work of humor funny. While students still struggle with these projects, I think they make the activity feel less "academic" and more intrinsically motivating, especially if you let them pick the commercial and/or work of humor. I also think asking students to write a review of a movie, product, TV show, video game, etc. requires them to use analytical skills in a more real world context, and I give my students the option to do this as well.
Overall, your process sounds very useful and meaningful, though it also sounds like a lot of work! :-)
Love all of this! I also use ads in class--car ads this time. I heard from several students that it helped for them to hear their classmates observations about the things we analyzed together. I haven't had students do a rhetorical analysis of their peers' writing, but I could see how that might be really helpful.
John Warner absolutely changed the way I teach writing. I don't use a lot of his exercises, but I always ask students to read the opening chapters of Why They Can't Write as a foundation for the class.
I like this approach a lot! It made me think about how sports practices often focus on components of the game, rather than the game as a whole. The skills aren't the game (just as the pieces of writing or rhetorical analysis lack something that a whole essay will contain) but they help prepare for it. In soccer, say, you spend time in practice working on ball skills, passing, isolating specific components of the game like corner kicks, etc. The goal is to piece all of that together in the game, which, like writing, is fluid and unpredictable and not reducible to the various skills it requires. But separating out the pieces is a way to hone specific skills that are hard to focus on during the game itself, which is more complex. This kind of practice is also helpful when players (or students) have different strengths and weaknesses. I could see students mistaking the "practice" (writing exercises that break a rhetorical analysis into parts) with the "game" (developing a full, coherent rhetorical analysis that integrates these parts). But I could also see that breaking the analysis into smaller exercises allows students to build the skills and really see what they understand and what they don't. Perhaps the more holistic analysis takes place later-- later in the course, in discussion, or perhaps in another course entirely. In any case, sounds like a good response from the students!
Thanks, Jane! I had an email from a reader who compared the method to gathering ingredients to put together in different recipes. I also love the idea of drills in preparation for a game. I'm especially taken with your idea that a game, "like writing, is fluid and unpredictable, and not reducible to the various skills it requires." I don't really have a fully-fledged rhetorical analysis paper for students to practice later, but my hope is that they'll apply the analytical skills they gain to their own research and persuasive writing in the second half of the class. I'm really hoping to bridge that gap successfully, but we'll see how it goes!
Thanks so much for sharing your rhetorical analysis template. I actually used this for a course on oral presentation skills. I asked students to work together in small groups to do complete an analysis for a TED talk and then used that exercise as a springboard for a full-class discussion. The template led to a deeper, more systematic analysis than we've had so far, and I'm definitely going to use it again.
Danielle, thanks so much for sharing this! I’m really happy to hear about these materials being used in another context, and I’m so glad you and your students found the activity useful!
I just discovered this post via "The Grading Podcast" (10/22/2024), so apologies for being redundant if you have already heard Joe Zeccola's responses to your questions regarding "best practices in the teaching of writing." I *love* your exercise, and I am totally stealing it for my argumentation course.
Honestly (from the perspective of a rhetorician in the Communication Studies tradition), this exercise that you are presenting *isn't* "teaching writing"... at least not exclusively or even primarily. This is absolutely a best practice in teaching *critical thinking*. Every student needs to develop this skill set and disposition, and sadly many of our colleagues who profess to teach critical thinking aren't very clear with students (and perhaps not clear themselves?) on what this actually means.
One of the many challenges students have with reading, maybe the hardest, is to make the "go meta" shift from "what is being said" to "*how* is it being said," and then to evaluate the rhetorical moves... and critical evaluation isn't (shouldn't be?) done by gut feels but by using substantive criteria as a basis of assessment.
To be blunt, if the "best practices for the teaching of writing" *don't* include the application of systematic critical thinking for many writing educators, this rhetorician thinks they're doing it wrong.
Thanks for your comment! I think everybody wants to do critical thinking--it's the "systematic" part that throws people (including myself) off. When *we* do critical thinking (or at least when I do?) it feels more intuitive and organic than a systematic approach would suggest. In the past, I have tended to think of critical analysis as something that was best taught primarily through modeling. But now I think students need more structure.
Actually, if you have any suggestions on one aspect of critical reading, I'd be appreciative: how have you gone about helping students identify implicit reasoning in arguments? I have struggled with this for a long time. Students have enough difficulty identifying the function of the argument pieces that are present, so identifying the pieces that are tacit causes many of them headaches. But it's a crucial skill for rhetorical analysis.
I did struggle with this last semester! I don't know that I have solutions, but there are two things I think I did wrong that I want to correct for in the future:
First, I wasn't clear enough initially about what "implicit" actually means, and I didn't reinforce this / remind students of our definition as often as I should have.
Second, I asked students to identify implicit arguments in pieces for which they didn't have enough context to be successful. "Context" was the other major thing I struggled with in general. In order to break down an argument successfully, students have to know something about the conversation it's contributing to. I tried to pick materials on topics that students would know something about (op-eds about social media, political ads, marketing materials for my own university, etc.). But students had much less context on these things than I assumed. I need to figure out what kinds of arguments students are actually following in their day-to-day lives...
I do find, as with many things, that advertising in general was a good entry point into implicit arguments. It was very easy for them, for example, to look at an ad for a Ford truck and understand the implicit argument is that you'll be more masculine if you buy this product. It was hard to transfer this to other kinds of texts, though.
As I'm rereading your comment, however, I see that you're asking about implicit "reasoning" rather than simply implicit arguments. I didn't really talk about reasoning in my classes, but I wonder if teaching the Toulmin method of analysis would be useful to you? You may already be familiar with this, but one step involves analyzing the "warrant" or underlying assumptions of a claim. Mike Caulfield has been doing fascinating work with using AI to perform Toulmin analyses: https://mikecaulfield.substack.com/
I have been teaching the Toulmin model for nearly 30 years, and this piece is the hardest part. So, hearing that someone has been making strides on this with AI (which I have been thinking about a lot lately but not done anything with yet) made my morning -- thanks!
Oh great! You should definitely check out Mike's work, then. His custom GPT can generate endless (and apparently pretty good) models of a Toulmin analysis.
I’m currently using the TQE Method to teach my students how to read and analyze text.
https://open.substack.com/pub/adrianneibauer/p/the-power-of-the-short-story?r=gtvg8&utm_medium=ios
For writing, I’ve adapted the work of John Warner, giving my students more opportunities to think on paper.
https://adrianneibauer.substack.com/p/changing-the-way-i-teach-writing?r=gtvg8
Love both of these! As I said above, reading John Warner's Why They Can't Write was absolutely transformative for me.
I like the idea of moving rhetorical analysis away from a formal "paper" structure and having the process broken down in smaller writing exercises. I have had similar feelings about my own rhetorical analysis paper assignment being inauthentic, and this is how I will be handling it this year:
1. I have found that doing group exercises using advertisements in class is a fun and less tedious way to practice analytical skills--students can still get feedback from me and each other, but I'm not sitting at my computer for hours doing that. I feel like they are still learning how the process works this way.
2. I am also thinking about making rhetorical analysis a part of the peer review process when students evaluate each others' writing. This way, they are practicing this skill in a meaningful context, but it's not necessarily something I have to "grade" and respond to.
3. I am a fan of John Warner's writing assignments in his book The Writer's Practice. He has several different analytical writing assignments which feel a bit more genuine and interesting than the typical rhetorical analysis paper. One asks students to analyze a commercial and identify the subtext, and another asks students to identify what makes a particular work of humor funny. While students still struggle with these projects, I think they make the activity feel less "academic" and more intrinsically motivating, especially if you let them pick the commercial and/or work of humor. I also think asking students to write a review of a movie, product, TV show, video game, etc. requires them to use analytical skills in a more real world context, and I give my students the option to do this as well.
Overall, your process sounds very useful and meaningful, though it also sounds like a lot of work! :-)
Love all of this! I also use ads in class--car ads this time. I heard from several students that it helped for them to hear their classmates observations about the things we analyzed together. I haven't had students do a rhetorical analysis of their peers' writing, but I could see how that might be really helpful.
John Warner absolutely changed the way I teach writing. I don't use a lot of his exercises, but I always ask students to read the opening chapters of Why They Can't Write as a foundation for the class.
I’ve done a similar assignment in my composition courses; I used The Open Notebook’s Storygram series as an example of rhetorical analysis annotations: https://www.theopennotebook.com/category/storygrams/
Ooh, thanks for sharing this!
This is terrific -- thanks so much for sharing it!
I like this approach a lot! It made me think about how sports practices often focus on components of the game, rather than the game as a whole. The skills aren't the game (just as the pieces of writing or rhetorical analysis lack something that a whole essay will contain) but they help prepare for it. In soccer, say, you spend time in practice working on ball skills, passing, isolating specific components of the game like corner kicks, etc. The goal is to piece all of that together in the game, which, like writing, is fluid and unpredictable and not reducible to the various skills it requires. But separating out the pieces is a way to hone specific skills that are hard to focus on during the game itself, which is more complex. This kind of practice is also helpful when players (or students) have different strengths and weaknesses. I could see students mistaking the "practice" (writing exercises that break a rhetorical analysis into parts) with the "game" (developing a full, coherent rhetorical analysis that integrates these parts). But I could also see that breaking the analysis into smaller exercises allows students to build the skills and really see what they understand and what they don't. Perhaps the more holistic analysis takes place later-- later in the course, in discussion, or perhaps in another course entirely. In any case, sounds like a good response from the students!
Thanks, Jane! I had an email from a reader who compared the method to gathering ingredients to put together in different recipes. I also love the idea of drills in preparation for a game. I'm especially taken with your idea that a game, "like writing, is fluid and unpredictable, and not reducible to the various skills it requires." I don't really have a fully-fledged rhetorical analysis paper for students to practice later, but my hope is that they'll apply the analytical skills they gain to their own research and persuasive writing in the second half of the class. I'm really hoping to bridge that gap successfully, but we'll see how it goes!
I love the sports analogy!
Thanks so much for sharing your rhetorical analysis template. I actually used this for a course on oral presentation skills. I asked students to work together in small groups to do complete an analysis for a TED talk and then used that exercise as a springboard for a full-class discussion. The template led to a deeper, more systematic analysis than we've had so far, and I'm definitely going to use it again.
Danielle, thanks so much for sharing this! I’m really happy to hear about these materials being used in another context, and I’m so glad you and your students found the activity useful!
I just discovered this post via "The Grading Podcast" (10/22/2024), so apologies for being redundant if you have already heard Joe Zeccola's responses to your questions regarding "best practices in the teaching of writing." I *love* your exercise, and I am totally stealing it for my argumentation course.
Honestly (from the perspective of a rhetorician in the Communication Studies tradition), this exercise that you are presenting *isn't* "teaching writing"... at least not exclusively or even primarily. This is absolutely a best practice in teaching *critical thinking*. Every student needs to develop this skill set and disposition, and sadly many of our colleagues who profess to teach critical thinking aren't very clear with students (and perhaps not clear themselves?) on what this actually means.
One of the many challenges students have with reading, maybe the hardest, is to make the "go meta" shift from "what is being said" to "*how* is it being said," and then to evaluate the rhetorical moves... and critical evaluation isn't (shouldn't be?) done by gut feels but by using substantive criteria as a basis of assessment.
To be blunt, if the "best practices for the teaching of writing" *don't* include the application of systematic critical thinking for many writing educators, this rhetorician thinks they're doing it wrong.
Thanks for your comment! I think everybody wants to do critical thinking--it's the "systematic" part that throws people (including myself) off. When *we* do critical thinking (or at least when I do?) it feels more intuitive and organic than a systematic approach would suggest. In the past, I have tended to think of critical analysis as something that was best taught primarily through modeling. But now I think students need more structure.
Actually, if you have any suggestions on one aspect of critical reading, I'd be appreciative: how have you gone about helping students identify implicit reasoning in arguments? I have struggled with this for a long time. Students have enough difficulty identifying the function of the argument pieces that are present, so identifying the pieces that are tacit causes many of them headaches. But it's a crucial skill for rhetorical analysis.
I did struggle with this last semester! I don't know that I have solutions, but there are two things I think I did wrong that I want to correct for in the future:
First, I wasn't clear enough initially about what "implicit" actually means, and I didn't reinforce this / remind students of our definition as often as I should have.
Second, I asked students to identify implicit arguments in pieces for which they didn't have enough context to be successful. "Context" was the other major thing I struggled with in general. In order to break down an argument successfully, students have to know something about the conversation it's contributing to. I tried to pick materials on topics that students would know something about (op-eds about social media, political ads, marketing materials for my own university, etc.). But students had much less context on these things than I assumed. I need to figure out what kinds of arguments students are actually following in their day-to-day lives...
I do find, as with many things, that advertising in general was a good entry point into implicit arguments. It was very easy for them, for example, to look at an ad for a Ford truck and understand the implicit argument is that you'll be more masculine if you buy this product. It was hard to transfer this to other kinds of texts, though.
As I'm rereading your comment, however, I see that you're asking about implicit "reasoning" rather than simply implicit arguments. I didn't really talk about reasoning in my classes, but I wonder if teaching the Toulmin method of analysis would be useful to you? You may already be familiar with this, but one step involves analyzing the "warrant" or underlying assumptions of a claim. Mike Caulfield has been doing fascinating work with using AI to perform Toulmin analyses: https://mikecaulfield.substack.com/
I have been teaching the Toulmin model for nearly 30 years, and this piece is the hardest part. So, hearing that someone has been making strides on this with AI (which I have been thinking about a lot lately but not done anything with yet) made my morning -- thanks!
Oh great! You should definitely check out Mike's work, then. His custom GPT can generate endless (and apparently pretty good) models of a Toulmin analysis.