Essay #1 Assignment Details
Write a 1000 word essay about your writing life. This is a personal exploration. It can include a narrative about your early writing years: how you learned to write, your techniques, influences, habits, likes/dislikes about writing. You can write about your past, present and future relationships to writing. Include various contexts—writingfor school, but also letters to your grandparents, and notes you may have passed in class (or texted?), writing you may do in your future career.
How do you feel about writing in various contexts? What lessons have you learned? What are your favorite tools? (Consider “hardware,” like computer keyboards, pencils or pens, and “software,” like spell check, word processors, paperback dictionaries, your own vocabulary.) What practices nurture your writing? You may want to consider your reading life as well.
Rhet 101 Mary Hays Assignment
Essay #2 Assignment Details
This is a historic election for many reasons.You will want to educate and inform yourself on the issues and the candidates’ positions. First, you’ll examine the platforms of at least four parties:
You’ll notice that these documents are each quite extensive, and you don’t need to read them in their entirety. However, you’ll want to read the preamble of each and note any textual or non-textual cues that give readers an idea of what each party values. Next, pick an issue that you care about and examine what each party says it will work for.
You’ll choose one plank of one of these platforms and write a 1250-1500 (±) word Toulmin-style rhetorical analysis of it and of the preamble and any prefacing remarks. Make sure you include any graphics (or lack thereof) in your analysis. You will want to be comprehensive in your analysis. In addition to the Toulmin Analysis, please consider the 3 parts of Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle. Although this is not a comparison paper, you may want to compare the platform you chose between 2 or more parties. It is also not an opinion paper (that will come later) but you may, if you wish, tell your readers your opinion about the plank you analyzed and how it might influence your vote.
You do not need to include secondary sources, but you will use at least one primary source, so you will need to cite it. (Obviously, you’ll need to cite any secondary sources you might choose to use.) We will discuss citing sources next week.
Rhet 101 Mary Hays Assignment