Through the analysis assignment, students will:
- Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts. You do this by applying what you learn to your thinking and your writing in different texts that are targeted at different audiences. As you can imagine, communicating with different groups requires changing your style and approach.
- Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes. Your ability to read and understand complex, engaging texts will help you create a college-level analysis essay.
- Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situation.
Things to keep in mind about analysis:
The content you will need for an analysis assignment can come from a wide variety of sources. For example, an analysis essay about race in the United States may analyze an article such as “The Heart of a Race Problem” in The Atlantic or the book The New Jim Crow or the video game Mafia 3. All bring different aspects of race in America to their audiences, hence all are relevant.In the following student samples, you’ll notice that the analyses may range in complexity and scope, from a relatively simple single-source analysis to some multi-source researched analysis examples.
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Accusative Voice in Sarah Resnick’s “H.” (2019-2020)
Taylor Esposito
In this analysis example, Esposito conducts a close reading on the structure and grammatical choice to use the accusative voice (addressing “you”) within an essay by Sarah Resnick. Esposito discusses how Resnick’s choices are effective in reaching the reader on the difficult subject of addiction.
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Why is Truth and Reason Rejected? (2019-2020)
Dina Hourigan
In this student example we can see the moves of the analysis anchor assignment as Hourigan analyzes a concept as her object—reason, knowledge, or objectivity. Her analysis pays particular attention to the context of this object within a contemporary era where reason or objectivity may have different rhetorical value.
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NCAA Athletics: What to Do with All this Money? (2019-2020)
Kasey Vaughan
In this student example we can see the moves of the analysis anchor assignment as Vaughan analyzes the debate over paying student athletes by focusing on the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Her analysis uses multiple outside sources to offer support to the reader in understanding the complexity of the debate, and in particular in tracing the NCAA revenue and financial aspects involved in compensating college-level athletes.