first I would like a draft of 3 pages and then i’ll extend the time by 5 days to allow you finish the essay.

Final Paper Assignment – Rhetorical Criticism

To complete your final paper, you should have already gone through all of the steps explained in the Foss book for doing the type of rhetorical criticism you have chosen -1) Select your artifact, 2) Analyze your artifact, 3) Formulate your research questions – and now are ready to write your paper. By the time you get to the point where you are ready to actually write your paper, you should also have already completed four of the five checkpoints and gotten feedback from me about them. So, what should you do from here? This assignment sheet explains the process you should go through in actually constructing your final paper and then provides an outline for what the final paper should look like. Remember, these instructions start AFTER you have done all of the Foss steps AND completed your first four checkpoints. If you have not done all of the steps, you might need to go back.

What do I do now:

1. Write your central claim and analysis section – Although you put yourself through the steps of doing a preliminary analysis for Checkpoint #1, these merely constitute your notes and may not reflect your final choice of theory/method your wrote up in Checkpoint #4. If you did not change your theory/method from Checkpoint #1, then you retracing your analysis steps, review your notes, and make sure have written a research question. If you did change your theory/method for Checkpoint #4, then make sure to go back and do the Foss steps for this method with your artifact.

Your central claim, or thesis, should be your answer to your research question based on what you found in your notes. It should be ONE sentence. Then you can follow it up with 3-5 explanatory sentences which sum up what you found in your analysis that demonstrate or support that central claim or thesis. This central claim will end up being written at the start of your analysis section and the supporting sentences will provide the outline for what goes into your analysis section.

For example, if I did a neo-Aristotelian analysis of President Bush’s 9/11 Speech for my final paper, I might have found that his goal was to comfort the American people. So my research question(s) might be something like: What rhetorical strategies did President Bush use to comfort the American people in his speech? And, in line with the goal of neo-Aristotelian criticism, was he effective? Based on what I found in my notes, I might decide that he was effective due to the ways he divided us/them (pathos), his use of references to specific groups of American people (pathos), and focus on actions being taken by the American people and government to move forward (ethos). So, my central claim would be an answer to the latter research question: President Bush was effective in providing comfort to the American people. My supporting statements would be: He was effective due to his use of ethos and pathos. Then the sections of my analysis section would explain how he used ethos and pathos and include references to specific quotes and examples from the speech that supported by conclusions.

2. Revise Checkpoints and Add to Appropriate Sections of the Final Paper – Now that you know what point you are trying to make in your final paper from writing your analysis section and central claim, you can revise your checkpoints and put them into your paper. See the outline of the final paper below for an explanation of what I will expect to see in each section. Based on these expectations and the feedback I gave you previously, you should be able to write the first three sections of the paper.

3. Write Your Conclusion – All you have left now is to write a brief conclusion. The easiest part of your conclusion is to provide a brief summary of the points you have already made. The best way to do this is to repeat (more briefly) the answer(s) you have already provided for your research question(s) and summarize the evidence from the artifact that supports your conclusions. The harder part of the conclusion is now to explain to your readers (me and the class) what we now understand that we did not before we read your paper. The simplest way to do this is to make connections (comparisons and contrasts) between what has been researched about your topic previous (from sections 1 & 2 of your paper) and what you found.

The following outline should give you a general idea of How to Organize Your Final Paper:

I. Introduction (approx. 1 page) – This will involve primarily revising Checkpoint #2. I will expect to see the following in your introduction:

A. Get the reader’s attention

B. Establish the significance or importance of your topics (includes research)

C. Explanation of the purpose of your research, or what you hope to find a result of your analysis

D. Outline of the sections of the paper

II. Brief summary or description of your artifact (approx. 1-2 pages) – This will involve parts of Checkpoint #2 as well. It should include two parts:

A. Summarize what your artifact is about in 1-2 paragraphs (do not do too much! Most of your details will come out in your analysis.)

B. Include scholarly research about your topic and/or artifact. What research has already been done onyour topic and/or research. Just summarizing this research is a minimum expectation. An advanced version of this section would include comparing and contrasting what others did with what you hope to do in your paper.

III. Definition of Rhetoric (approx.1 page) – This will involve revising and selecting relevant section of Checkpoint #3. It should NOT just be your whole Checkpoint #3, even as it SHOULD include relevant connections to theorists you used in Checkpoint #3. To make choices about what to include and what to delete, consider the two parts I will be looking for in your paper:

A. Your definition of rhetoric

B. Explanation of the relevance of your definition of rhetoric to your artifact and type of analysis you have chosen to conduct (theory/method).

IV. Summary of the theory and method (approx. 2-3 pages) – This will involve revising Checkpoint #4. It should include explanation of both important theoretical concepts and a step-by-step explanation of the steps you went through to do your analysis, including appropriate references and citations to your textbook and the additional article(s) you used. The step-by-step explanation should now be written in PAST TENSE to actually reflect what you DID to do your analysis. This also provides a perfect transition to the next section of the paper where you actually write your central claim or what you found as a result of your analysis.

V. Results of your analysis or Report of your findings (approx. 4-6 pages) – Your analysis section should be dominant elements that emerged in your analysis. The method you used will determine what these elements are (e.g., if you did a neo-Aristotelian criticism, you may end up focusing on the speaker’s ethos and delivery, whereas if you did an ideological criticism you might end up focusing on how power was represented by the family unit shown in a particular TV show). This section SHOULD NOT be just a summary of your object of analysis nor be organized around episodes of a television show or scenes from a movie (scenes should be used as examples to support themes, they are not themes themselves). Nor should it be ALL of your analysis steps. Keep in mind that Foss takes you through the steps in doing your analysis, but at the end explains that you will now write your paper. In other words, your analysis is NOT your paper itself.

Please see the link provided on Canvas for a sample analysis section of a paper. I have also provided sample final papers attached below the Final Paper Assignment that include analysis sections done according to these guidelines. Please also remember that these are examples and should provide you with guidelines for your section. There is no rule that says that you have to have three themes or that the themes shouldn’t interact with one another (if they do, that is another section of your analysis section!). You should still be creative and adapt the format of your analysis section to best present your analysis.

A. Theme #1 – identify theme in topic sentence; explain theme (what is included in it? What is excluded from it? How it emerge?); provide examples from your object of analysis (in the form of scenes, dialogue, lyrics, etc.) that demonstrate the theme AND explain how they demonstrate the theme.

B. Theme #2 – identify theme in topic sentence; explain theme (what is included in it? What is excluded from it? How it emerge?); provide examples from your object of analysis (in the form of scenes, dialogue, lyrics, etc.) that demonstrate the theme AND explain how they demonstrate the theme.

C. Theme #3 – identify theme in topic sentence; explain theme (what is included in it? What is excluded from it? How it emerge?); provide examples from your object of analysis (in the form of scenes, dialogue, lyrics, etc.) that demonstrate the theme AND explain how they demonstrate the theme.

VI. Conclusions/Implications(approx. 1-2 pages) – Should include explicit answers to your research questions, how they can be explained with the theory you used to guide your analysis, and what you learned and what the reader should learn from your paper, including connections to others (scholars) research on the topic and/or artifact