Essay Three: Rhetorical Analysis
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Essay Three: Rhetorical Analysis This quarter we’ve done a fair amount of talking about the notion of interpretive (or discourse) communities, much of it under the aspect of audience analysis. We’re aware that different audiences have different expectations regarding the likes of subject matter, prose style, appropriate tone, valid evidence; writers make choices about such matters based in large measure on the nature of the audience they’re writing for. And it’s not only writers’ individual texts that are directed toward a particular audience, but also whole collections of texts—collections of texts such as periodicals. To offer a too-obvious example, even a quick glance would tell us that The Star is aimed at a good deal different readership than is Atlantic Monthly. Your task in this essay is to characterize the intended audience for a periodical of your choosing, based on specific textual evidence (properly documented, of course) from the periodical in question (the audience for your essay, by the way, will once again be members of the academic community). Begin by heading for the periodical shelves in the library or the magazine rack at the supermarket in order to choose a periodical for analysis (or pick several—you can always narrow things down later). Examine your periodical—more than one issue—closely, paying attention to such features as the sort of photos or illustrations found on the cover and inside, the frequency and nature of advertisements, the varieties of writing represented (news reports, brief articles, extended essays, interviews, fiction, poetry. . .), the kinds of subject matter covered, the sorts of information and evidence presented, and the nature of the language employed (Are sentences generally simple or complicated? Do tone and diction tend toward the formal or the informal? Is much jargon or specialized vocabulary in evidence?). Then devise a thesis—a claim regarding what the features you’ve examined suggest about the sort of readers the periodical is aimed at. Some of the numerous categories you might consider as you seek to characterize your periodical’s target audience are age, gender, family situation, education level, occupation, income level, political ideology, and religious conviction. Once you get rolling, be sure to show at least one preliminary draft of your essay to me (note: you’re no longer required to show me your plan, but I’d be happy to take a look if you want me to), and be sure to let at least two peer reviewers from our class have a look at your work in progress. There are a couple points you’ll want to be clear on as you begin this task. For one thing, remember that your job here is not to evaluate the periodical you’re discussing. Sure, you might be able to work a few notes of praise or complaint into your prose, but your central purpose is not to tell your reader how wonderful or horrible magazine X is, but rather, to argue that the magazine focuses on a particular target audience. Likewise, this assignment does not ask you to do research about the magazine in order to discover a target audience; that is, your strategy shouldn’t be, say, to go to the periodical’s web site and see who the publishers identify as their target audience. Rather, your task is to look at specific features of the periodical—specific textual evidence—in order to determine its particular target audience. For instance, does the magazine feature ads for vehicles like the thirteen thousand dollar Kia Rio? If so, it’s probably targeting folks of a different income level than a magazine whose automobile ads highlight the likes of eighty-five thousand dollar BMWs. Or do articles in several issues of the magazine include frank discussions of sexuality with little apparent concern for whether the people engaging in the sex are married or not? If that’s the case, it’s likely the target audience is a good deal more “socially liberal” than would be the audience for a magazine whose few discreet discussions of sexuality tend to focus on the value of abstinence. In essence, your task here is to come up with three sharply focused descriptors—descriptors like “of modest means” or “socially liberal”—that characterize the intended audience for your periodical and then to employ cogent explanations and lots of specific textual evidence to convince your readers—as usual, members of the academic discourse community—that these descriptors are indeed accurate. That is, your thesis for this essay is likely to take a form something like “Much evidence from magazine X suggests the magazine aims at readers who are socially liberal, of modest means, and __?___.” Note that to be at all convincing with your claims about the periodical’s typical target audience, you’ll have to survey more than one issue; thus, a requirement for this assignment is that material from at least two different issues of the magazine be represented on your works cited page. Plan, too, on that works cited list being a long one since each specific example—each particular ad, photo, article, advice column, or whatever—you briefly discuss in your text will get its own separate entry on your list. And one last point, this one regarding your consideration of skeptics. Of course in our first two essays the moves thoughtful thinkers and writers make as they considered the views of skeptical readers—establishing common ground, qualifying their claims, responding to likely objections either with concession or rebuttal—were issues you paid lots of attention to, under the heading of rhetorical evaluation in our first essay and as practices you engaged in as a writer in the second. Given the nature of this third essay, though, you can take a little more relaxed attitude toward responding to skeptics: if, in a few key spots you qualify your claims (“Of course no one would assert that every single reader of this magazine falls into these three categories, but evidence would suggest those who do are the magazine’s primary target audience”; “While not every ad points to a wealthy readership, most of the major ads do”) you should, in most cases, be attending to skeptics as carefully as you need to. As you begin working through your writing process for this assignment, bear in mind that virtually any periodical—anything from Scientific American to True Romance—is fair game here, though magazines whose audiences seem either too narrow, too broad, or too obvious might not be ideal candidates. Understand, too, that (here comes a qualifier—wait for it. . .) none of the foregoing is meant to imply that every single reader of any periodical conforms to a single stereotype; in real life, we might often be surprised by the reading habits of our fellows. Still, it’s possible to make generalizations about the sort of readership a particular periodical is aiming for and to validate those generalizations with specific evidence from the periodical in question. Such is your job in this essay. Draft/Drafts: Assessment: + OK More revision, please Directory: InternetContent -> AutoWebs AutoWebs -> Chords harmony: The musical result of pitches sounding together. 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