Assignment B: Gathering, Managing, and Using Outside Sources to Evaluate the Argument of a Text:
Use multiple texts that examine a significant public argument,
identifying and analyzing the rhetorical strategies used to support their arguments. Explain how those strategies contribute to the authors’ appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. Consider how those strategies are based on key assumptions the authors make about their audiences. Evaluate the relative effectiveness of the texts with respect to the intended audiences.
Choose an essay we have read and discussed since the first paper. Through research, find three recent sources that relate to your choice of material. Focus your paper on explaining how they relate to the essay. Use one book (besides your text) – not Wikipedia – one
periodical or newspaper, and one Internet source; or substitute a primary source – perhaps an interview, substituting it for one of the secondary sources. Document research correctly. (Use your RWS text to help you.) Use a dictionary to help you clarifynew words but not as one of your sources. Establish a thesis to cover the relationship between text and sources.
Keep in mind that this assignment asks you to identify an author’s argument and evaluate how persuasive that argument would be to a thoughtful and informed member of its intended audience by examining that text in the light of other arguments made on that same topic. The goal here is not to write an agree-disagree paper but, rather, to consider how the additional sources can be used to reframe the original text’s position. These outside sources should be used to extend, complicate, illustrate, qualify, or challenge the
argument, and how this new understanding can be drawn on to evaluate the strength of the original text. Also, incorporate the author’s appeal to three rhetorical strategies covered in class.