It makes sense to show students a model (or example) before you ask them to write. You can find some ideas about selecting models at http://writingcenter.tamu.edu/for-faculty/teaching-writing/instruction/models-or-examples/. In this post, I argue that starting with the end product will give you a better result. Decide what you want students to compose (whether a presentation, a video, or a paper), find a good example of it, then analyze its rhetoric it to guide your assignment, your instruction, and your assessment.
The rhetorical analysis is the means by which you make explicit what you, as an writer in your discipline, know tacitly. Once you have made the features of the model explicit, you will know what to emphasize in teaching.
Although you can do a rhetorical analysis of a document, a speech, a video, or anything that addresses an audience, I’ll limit this discussion to documents. The basics are similar, but the particulars of design or style will differ.
First, establish the rhetorical situation
The first step in a rhetorical analysis is to evaluate the rhetorical situation the model addresses. Any document responds to a rhetorical situation. That means it can be considered in the light of three basic elements: its writer, its audience, and its topic.
The writer will have a reason for writing, a claim to make, or a purpose such as informing, explaining, expressing, or entertaining. The audience is reading for its own purposes and brings to the reading expectations about what is appropriate in a given type of document. The audience would expect a business memo to be professional in tone, informative, and concise, for example . The topic, what we often think of as content, is affected by the rhetorical situation, too. The way we approach the topic, the depth we go into, the type or level of evidence for an argument or detail for an exposition, for example, is influenced by the writer’s purpose, the audience’s purpose, and the expectations for any given genre.
Documents that focus mostly on the writer have an expressive purpose—the writer wants to share his or her views, as in a journal or a manifesto. When the focus is on the audience, the purpose is persuasive—the writer wants the audience to do something (often seen in advertising or argument). A document that focuses on the topic is informative or expository—the writer wants the audience to know something, as is often the case in scientific or technical writing.
You might be surprised how much understanding a document’s rhetorical situation can help students decide how to approach it. Knowing, for example, that readers of a scientific journal article are looking for the results of an experiment so they can judge its quality and significance, they’ll have a better sense of what to include and what level of style to use. Even if this seems evident to you, your students may not have considered that the rhetorical situation shapes their composing.
Next, establish the features of document design
Look at your model and break it down into parts. The basic guiding question for analyzing document design is this: How is the document designed to meet reader expectations and conform to genre type? Does it violate any expectations? Review the following:
- Sections
- Heading style
- Spacing (including white space)
- Visuals
You can usually go a bit deeper than introduction, body, conclusion. If there is an argument, note the placement of the thesis and follow the chain of reasoning and evidence. If there are headings, pay attention to their function in guiding the reader. For example, a scientific research article generally includes an abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, implications, and references section, although there could be slight variation. If there is variation, why? Is the variation specific to the article’s purpose? A quirk of the writer? A feature of the genre?
Last of all, establish the document’s basic style
To analyze the style, ask the following question: What elements of the grammar, usage, diction, and paragraph structure contribute to achieving the document’s rhetorical purpose? Consider these basic elements:
- Sentences
- Paragraphs
- Diction (Word Choice)
- Grammar
- Documentation style
How long are the sentences? Do they tend to be simple, compound, complex, or a mixture of these? (In academic writing, it’s common for them to range in length from short to long, but mostly in the middle, and to be more complex than simple.) If you need a primer on sentence types, refer to our screencast on sentence types.
Most academic articles have fairly long paragraphs that tend to be organized around a topic sentence. For a primer on paragraphs, check out our page on teaching paragraphs. In word choice, you might want to consider the use of jargon and whether words are colloquial (everyday) or more formal. Grammar can be examined in areas like use of informal contractions (not used in much scholarly writing), in the point-of-view, (the use of I or we), and in active or passive voice. Don’t just assume that the “rules” always hold. Examine your model. The real situation is often more complex than rules suggest.
On documentation styles, it’s helpful to note when a style differs from the MLA style students used in high school or English classes. For example, in many disciplines, the dates are important, so internal citations highlight the date and not just the author. Also the use of direct quotes is very rare in some writing. Look at how internal citations are worked into the text, what kind of verbs are used to introduce the work of others, and how and if direct quotations are used.
I said you can use the information you get from a rhetorical analysis to design an assignment, create a rubric for assessment, and guide instruction to prepare students to write. That’s because the rhetorical analysis helps you see the features you need to teach.
In the assignment, make sure you describe the rhetorical situation. For instruction, bring the model to class and analyze it rhetorically. Finally, for the assessment, decide which of these features are most crucial and make sure you are evaluating those in your rubric. When you do the work of a rhetorical analysis of a model, you’ll be prepared to help students produce documents you want to read and that follow the expectations of the readers in your discipline.
For more on using models in the classroom, see my post, “Copy cat: Using models to increase rhetorical knowledge.”