The 3 Reasons I Teach Rhetorical Analysis

What’s Really New? Last week I kicked off the rhetorical analysis unit with my first year writers and when I named and described the work we would be doing on Tuesday I asked my students to trust me. We had so much good writing when I asked them to write about “what stories matter” but they were skeptical until we began digging into the layers of meaning that can be found in the stories that matter to us. Rhetorical analysis is important work in general, but I really love using popular culture texts (the books, movies, and television shows that speak to us so much we return to them again and again) because we need to unpack the messages those texts carry for us as well as the ways that our culture adds layers of meaning to those texts.

What’s New? This week my students dug into the lenses (or ways of studying) they could use to analyze their chosen games and I loved our conversations so much. Such delicious meta thinking and writing as we discussed how rhetorical analysis can be viewed as a game and explored the many lenses we can use to analyze our chosen texts. I have loved the addition of social contract theory to our roster of more traditional analytical tools (historical, philosophical, reader-response, etc.) and I continue to love how much serious rhetorical work is taking place under the cover of play.

Now that our rhetorical analysis unit is in the books and I am reading students’ unit reflections while we begin work on our argument unit I am struck anew by how well our rhetorical analysis unit prepares students for good faith arguments. Superficially our rhetorical analysis work introduces a number of important skills ranging from summary to citations, but student reflections highlight the many deep rhetorical lessons they learned from this work and I cannot wait to see how they deploy those skills in service of their authentic arguments.

Update: This week my students kicked off our rhetorical analysis unit by asking the question “what stories matter” and I was reminded once again how much I love this work. I love the passion so many of my students bring to their story selection and the response to their writing about those stories. Perhaps most importantly I love how my enthusiasm for the stories that I love connects and intersects and inspires our writing community.

Original: For much of my teaching career I resisted teaching the rhetorical analysis essay. I became a college writing instructor after working as a professional writer (journalist and novelist) and some of the popular essay formulas such as rhetorical analysis just felt too cumbersome and awkward to me. Rhetorical analysis in specific felt very artificial and inauthentic. But now I know I was just hanging out with the wrong crowd (and seeing the wrong writing assignments). Over time and in many ways my PLN showed me that the rhetorical analysis offers dynamic, exciting teaching and writing opportunities and for several years I have been all in when it comes to teaching rhetorical analysis because rhetorical analysis offers fun, depth, and range.

Fun?

When I introduce our rhetorical analysis unit I always love to tell students that it will be fun because I can see by their expressions that they think I am off my rocker. After all, the words rhetorical analysis invoke the exact opposite. However, it does not take long before they see the potential for fun and soon they are all in too. Fun matters to me because I am in the business of making writers and not simply teaching writing. Making writers requires that we engage in authentic writing. The writing we create in my classroom should give students “agency and choice to pursue writing that matters to them and is relevant to their world.” My rhetorical analysis unit offers students agency and choice by allowing them to choose both the text they will analyze and the lens they will use to conduct that analysis. Students are excited by their ability to choose a popular culture text (Writing I) or game (Writing II) meaningful to them which means that my students recently turned in essays exploring texts ranging from How To Train Your Dragon to The Hunger Games to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Next semester that range will be even broader as it can encompass sports, role playing games, board games, and electronic games. (Because themes rock!) However, as we begin experimenting and playing with using different lenses to study their chosen texts student engagement ratchets up another notch. As audience members they are excited to discover unnoticed layers of meaning and intention in their beloved books, movies, and TV shows. As writers they are motivated to learn that their words and messages can impact others in ways they had never before considered. There are many important pedagogical reasons to teach rhetorical analysis, but as a writing instructor teaching a required class largely filled by reluctant writers, if I can match pedagogy with fun then it is a win for everyone. Mixing fun into writing instruction is even more important during a pandemic.

Scope

Even as technology has exponentially expanded the ways and means of human communication, too often writing instruction remains focused on a very limited concept of textual communication worthy of study. I have been teaching writing in both K-12 and postsecondary settings for more than 30 years (with some overlap working as a professional writer) and too many schools, programs, and teachers are still indoctrinating students with the idea that text is one thing and one thing only – some weird mutt genre academic essay that comes in a few different flavors but is essentially the same thing. I work throughout the semester to teach students that text is not one thing and that, in fact, everything is an argument (nod to Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz). I have always tried to teach my students that every communication comes with an agenda, but it is the practice of rhetorical analysis that helps my students see and understand this more effectively than any lecture or reading assignment. As we peel back the layers of meaning while studying games or popular culture texts, students learn to question the motivations of every content creator. The discussion, reading, thinking, and writing we engage in during the rhetorical analysis unit is an important part of my effort to make my students better consumers of information and text. Our rhetorical analysis work also helps my developing writers see writing in new ways. Rhetorical analysis offers many important tools and lenses for understanding the goals and context of the content we consume as well as the impact of those texts on our lives. Engaging in rhetorical analysis can have lasting impact on my students as humans, thinkers, and writers.

Range

While rhetorical analysis is fun and offers a lot of scope for learning about texts in all variations, it is also an important tool for teaching writers and rhetoricians by offering a range of rhetorical experiences. There are so many essential lessons from exploring the rhetorical situation of a text to learning how to write a summary to citing a variety of sources while also working on our writing craft that occur during the process of writing rhetorical analysis essays, but one of the things I love best about teaching rhetorical analysis is the fun you can have as a writer. Writing a rhetorical analysis essay should be a very creative experience. We are breaking up texts into puzzle pieces and then reassembling them to make new meaning. We are looking for hidden clues and cultural connections. We are playing games, reading books, and watching movies that we love once more with feeling. We are engaged with playful experimentation and that is the very best kind of learning there is. In my collaborative classroom student writers become very engaged as writers and readers of text — they become rhetoricians.

How did it go?

My rhetorical analysis unit followed a similar pattern and structure to that used for my first unit (in Writing I that is American Creed) because I teach using HyperDoc templates specifically designed to support my workshop approach to teaching writing. Each class began with as a jam session with writing invitations crafted to spark thinking and writing about rhetorical analysis. These included what stories matterwhat can we learn from stories, and who tells our stories. Each week students also engaged in asynchronous online work because I have always believed writing instruction is better with time and space for students to set their own pace but also because we are still in a pandemic and the semester has been marked by students missing class due to quarantine, illness, and life. This online work included creating snaps early in the process to choose the texts for exploration and the lenses that could be used for that study. Early draft essays received feedback from the community via an inquiry process I currently use to guide workshop. Final drafts were paired with unit reflections as part of our ungrading process.

As I have noted before, rhetorical analysis exposes writers to a wide range of purposes and types of text and that alone makes it a wonderful tool for writing teachers. However, learning to look underneath the hood of a piece of text for meaning and motivation is important for rhetoricians and humans. And if we can do all that while having fun and with every activity serving multiple purposes then that, my friends, is definitely a journey worth taking.

Image by 41330 from Pixabay

Author: Deanna Mascle
#TeachingWriting and leading #NWP site @ Morehead State (KY): Passionate about #AuthenticWriting, #DeeperLearning, #PBL, #Ungrading, and #HyperDocs.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.