News Article Rhetorical Analysis
1.What is the author’s purpose? What is the central claim of the article?
2.Who is the intended audience?
3.How effectively does the writer persuade the audience to accept their claim(s)?
4.What strategies affect the persuasiveness of the article? Be sure to consider some of the aspects of argument like ethos, logos, and pathos as well as ideas that Mills covers in Chapter 2 “Reading to Figure out the Argument,” such as claims, reasons, limits, and responses to counterarguments. As we make more progress in the class, include other rhetorical strategies as well.
5.What connections are there between the effectiveness of the article and other ideas that we have read about and discussed?
Here is the counterargument piece in my text book for question 4
Very often, as we read an argument we will find not just what the author thinks and believes, but the author’s description of other people’s opposing arguments as well. An argument is part of an ongoing broader conversation about the subject, and the writer can remind us of what they are responding to. So as we read we can look for and mark these counterarguments.
In a complex text it can be easy to miss that a particular point is actually not one that the writer agrees with–they may be bringing it up in order to shoot it down. We can look out for particular phrases that are often used in academic writing to signal that the writer is switching sides temporarily and describing an idea that goes against the argument.
Very often the way the author will both signal to us that they are introducing the counterargument and signal their attitude toward it. They will convey the degree to which they disagree and the respect or contempt they feel for this opposing view.
Once we know what the main point of the reading is, we can ask ourselves what reasons the author gives. We can go through our annotations to look at the other claims and see how some may be used as reasons for the main claim or as reasons for one of the reasons.
We can write the claims in a map and use the arrows to show which claim works as a reason supporting which other claim. Each claim moves our mind from one idea to the next in the direction the writer wants it to go. The claim farthest to the right, the one that the others point toward, is the main point. Such maps might take a few different forms, such as these:
Reason → Claim
Reason A → Reason B → Claim
Reason A → Claim
Reason B ↗
