After students annotate a speech, we hold our first formal discussion of it. In my class, that’s an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Then we move into a core tool for developing a rhetorical analysis essay: a graphic organizer that bridges reading the text and writing about it.
Setting up the discussion
How I set up discussion depends on class size. With a small class of about 15 students or fewer, it’s simple: everyone makes one big circle with their desks or tables.
For medium-sized classes, I’ve had a lot of luck with inner circle/outer circle discussions. Students in the inner circle talk while students in the outer circle watch or take notes. Sometimes I pair each outer-circle student with someone in the inner circle to give feedback on how they’re doing. Then the pairs swap places, and the inner person returns the favor. Plan a stopping point in the text ahead of time, so the first group discusses up to that point and the second group picks up from there to the end. Save a little time at the end for open conversation.
For really big classes, say more than 26 students, you may need small groups of five or six, and you travel from group to group.
No matter the format, I start a rhetorical analysis discussion by giving students five minutes to list the elements of the rhetorical situation on notebook paper or the back of the text, or to find the notes they already took. That means speaker, purpose, audience, context, and exigence. From there we move into students’ questions about the text and their reactions, and then into the rhetorical features of the text. Those will likely be things that came up in the guided annotation or that you’ve drawn their attention to.
Moving to the graphic organizer
The discussion might take the whole class period. After that, we move into the first graphic organizer. I use the Douglass speech as my model for writing a rhetorical analysis essay, so I go through every stage with students. It’s important that they can see what you’re writing as you write it.
This graphic organizer is my staple tool for introducing how to organize an essay. Students are not writing “the author achieves their purpose through ethos, pathos, and logos.” It’s not that basic. Instead, the organizer helps them sort the devices and choices in the text around the impact those choices have on the audience. For example, Douglass contrasts dark, depressing imagery of slavery with light, celebratory imagery of freedom, and both appeal to the audience’s emotions. I want students to name the choice (contrasting imagery) and put evidence of it in the middle section.
We start with the title, identify important details about the speaker and audience, and state the purpose clearly. If the purpose has several layers, we dig into that. Then we take time to look for evidence. Once we have it, I ask students which set of rhetorical strategies has the most evidence, or which is the strongest and most compelling.
Then they write their first thesis statement with me. I’m a firm believer in sentence frames and scaffolds for thesis statements, especially for something as routine as rhetorical analysis. I use a straightforward formula:
[Speaker] advances his or her purpose of [purpose] through [strategy 1] and [strategy 2].
Students can add a third strategy if they want. Those strategies represent rhetorical choices, not appeals; the appeals come up in the commentary. For many of my students, this is the first rhetorical analysis writing they’ve ever done, and the frame gives them a scaffold to build their own thinking on. We work through it and talk it out together. Then they have a model to follow when they repeat the process on their own with two new texts.
The organizer is a great tool for getting students started, and I sell it separately if you aren’t using anything else from my units. It also includes a model with a different speech, thesis statement included, in case you need an alternate text.