Background
This assignment asks you to practice the rhetorical reading strategies that Haas and Flower describe in “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning.” As a college writer, you need to make rhetorical reading a normal habit. To read texts rhetorically is to read them as if they’re people talking to you, people with motivations that may not always be explicit but are always present. It means talking about not only what a text says or what it means, but what it does. (Start a war? Make a friend laugh? Get an addict into rehab? Start a romance?) When you read a text trying to figure out what it does or why a person would go to the trouble of writing it, you’re reading rhetorically.

Object of study
For this rhetorical reading project, the object of your analysis will be a scholarly journal article or a book chapter. Working in this genre will give you important additional practice for reading scholarly work rhetorically in your later classes, and you’ll probably have a lot to learn about how scholarly communities work in order to do the assignment well. Your assignment is to rhetorically read a text and compose a four- to five-page piece that explains your interpretation of what the writer mean to text to accomplish, and why.

Your Task
Select a Text. You should use the library’s research resources to locate a scholarly article in your major or related to the course theme (if any). You’ll probably do a better job if you pick an article or book chapter on a subject of interest to you, so try to choose something you are personally interested in. (For example, if your major is Biology and you are interested in genetic engineering, you might choose an article that addresses that subject.) The primary functional constraint on your choice of article is that you must be able to trace its provenance—to know where it was published, when, and by whom.

Summarize the Text. Read carefully and summarize the text. Look for these aspects of the text in building your summary:

– The territory the text covers, and the niche it occupies (which may be the thesis, if it has one);
– The text’s main parts or sections;
– The main lines of argument;
– Its theoretical framework (underlying theories or principles it uses to frame the argument);
– Any research methods the writer used;
– Any findings or results the writer reports;
– The writer’s discussion of the implication of their work.

Note: In a scientific study this may follow the IMRAD structure (introduction, methods, results and discussion).

Points: 150 (15% of your grade)
Work: individual
Length: ~1,000—1,200 words
Key feature: Introduces, summarizes, and evaluates the quality of an argument in its immediate or other context
Format: APA formatted paper
Due: Week 7 (date to be established by instructor)

Historicize the Text. Along with summarizing what the text says, you’ll collect some basic information on the text’s provenance. This information is crucial to rhetorical reading because it will help you make inferences later about the exigence and motives that gave birth to the text, helping you to understand what it was meant to do. Most of this information is contextual, meaning that it lies with but outside the text. Some of the things you need to know about the text include:
– Who wrote it? You need to go beyond the name associated with the text and do a little basic research to find out more about the author.
– Who published it? What journal or book did it originally appear in? Who publishes the journal or book? What other kinds of things to they publish?
– Who reads what this publisher prints? Don’t assume you are the intended audience. Find out who a given journal or book expects to read its work.
– When was the text written? Especially in the sciences it is important to know when the writing happened. This will tell you: (1) what the writer could and could not have known at the time of the writing; and (2) where on the field’s and the broader culture’s timeline the writing occurred. Was it written during a particularly important “conversation” in the field? Was it before or after that?

Answering these questions historicizes a text by telling the reader how the text fits into the broader web of rhetors, circumstances, evens, and material objects that would have given rise to the text in the first place.
Write Your Interpretation of the Text’s Context, Exigence, Motivations, and Aims. The thesis of your rhetorical reading analysis should have to do with what the article does (or did at its point in history) and why the writer wanted to do that. Your final step in this project is creating your interpretation of the text’s history, and what it says, in order to make these assertions about the exigence, motivations, and aims that fueled the text given the context in which it was written. Here are some of the functions you might consider for your analysis (in no particular order):
– What is the article’s context? When and where did the text first appear? What historical moment, if any, made this relevant? What important information can you provide about the writer and publisher?
– In what ongoing conversation does the text participate? (Swales’ CARS concepts of territory and niche might be helpful here.)
– What is the writer’s main argument? Include claims and support, but also consider what warrants the readers must accept in order be convinced by the argument. (Reviewing Toulmin could be helpful here.)
– What conclusions can you come to about the exigence, motivations, and aims of the text? What was the text meant to accomplish, and why? How do what it says and what it means relate to what the text actually does (accomplishes?).
– What evidence exists for your interpretations? When you make a claim about the text or its context, what evidence do you have to offer that supports this? Quotations from the text and external sources may be useful here.

_______________________
What makes it good?
1) The main purpose of your essay should focus on what the text does and why the author meant to do that;
2) It should summarize the text you’re interpreting. It should discuss the context in which the text appeared;
3) It should be organized and include an introduction, summary of the text, historical context, interpretation section, and conclusion;
4) Finally, it should include textual evidence to support your claims.

________________________
Style and citations
You should use APA style for citations and formatting; this means you need to use a cover page, abstract page, and reference page, and caption and label any figures accordingly.

Drafts
During the writing of this paper (and all subsequent papers) you will be required to bring printed in-process drafts to class or post drafts in Blackboard before class on the day they are due.
Assessment
You will be assessed via Written Communication Rubric (see BlackBoard).