# 7. Advice to Beginners

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This advice is derived from my work with students in this class over many years and from online resources developed by BYU's Writing Center and by Prof. Patricia Roberts-Miller, emerita professor at UT Austin. It also draws on a 2020 article by Whitney Gent, Emily Sauter, and Daniel Cronn-Mills (see References).
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### "Interest" is, er...an Interesting Concept

* Your interest in analyzing a primary rhetorical artifact doesn’t necessarily mean that you approve of or agree with the artifact, its rhetor, or its audience.&#x20;
* Remember that to analyze a primary artifact is not to just cheer for it. Neither is it to just attack it.&#x20;
* You are acting as an observer--your project is not about whether you personally find the primary artifact persuasive, laudable, troubling, etc., or whether your values are the ones that matter in analysis.&#x20;
* Concentrate on audiences, contexts, rhetorical appeals, and the particulars of each assignment’s concepts. In some of my work as a rhetorical analyst, I examine rhetoric that I would personally never find compelling, but I examine it, in part, because some audiences do find it compelling.&#x20;
* The best motivation for a project is simple curiosity—an itch that you have to scratch. Write something that you’d like to read.

### You are Arguing

* Remember that rhetorical analysis is an argument. At their most basic level, arguments are claims plus reasons plus assumptions that an audience is asked to understand and possibly accept.&#x20;
* You make arguments about things that you can’t simply demonstrate, so your claims will never be 100% guaranteed to succeed with all audiences. An argument involves risk: the risk that the arguer or audience will be changed by the encounter—and risk that they might not.&#x20;
* You will not be required to craft arguments that could succeed in every situation (impossible to do anyway). You will also definitely not be expected to try to figure out what I would argue and serve that up to me. Instead, you will participate in what Kenneth Burke called the “unending conversation” about how rhetoric works and why.
* Make your best case, using the relevant concepts from the course material and evidence from the primary artifact. Even if a classmate is examining the same primary artifact that you are, and argues something else about it, you can both succeed if you make and support a case for something substantive that the relevant concepts help you to illuminate. Aim to make your best case for a reader who is interested and supportive, but who also expects you to establish your claims and stay focused.

### Rhetorical Appeals Work Together

* Rhetorical appeals always work in concert with one another. While you will focus on certain appeals at certain times, don’t treat them as working in isolation.&#x20;
* Try to focus on something interesting about the particular relationships among appeals. This will become clearer in particular assignments.

### No Psychoanalysis or Soul-Reading

* You are not peering into a rhetor’s or audience’s mind or soul—professional advocates, for example, often make arguments that they themselves don’t accept 100%, but that fit the situation and their client’s interests.&#x20;
* Neither are you peering into the minds or souls of audience members. Focus on the primary rhetorical artifact and the particular purposes of each project.

### Mind the Ratio of Summary/Description vs. Analysis

* Remember that summary and description are necessary, but not sufficient. You will have to summarize and describe things to set up your analysis. You will need to cite sources for facts and background, as needed. There’s no getting around that. But your chief purpose is to analyze and argue.
* Summary and description enable the analysis but do not substitute for it. Try taking two highlighters of different colors (physically or in a word-processing app) to show yourself the amount of text that is summary or description versus analysis. What is the ratio?

### Precision Helps You

* Try to be precise. Observing that a rhetor did X or Y “to connect with the audience” or “chose vivid words” does not shed light on much since those observations are rudimentary and generic. **Any rhetor can be assumed in most cases to want to do these things, so an essay isn’t necessary to point them out**.&#x20;
* However, an essay might be necessary to point out something specific that might otherwise go unnoticed. What is going on precisely, in your artifact, to create a view of how things are or should be?

### You are Already a Rhetorical Analyst

* Rhetorical analysis is a challenging and specific activity that anyone can learn, but you already belong to the community of rhetorical analysts. You have been paying attention to communication and language your whole life. We are just building on that experience and deepening your skills.&#x20;
* You don’t have to prove that you belong by writing as you think scholars “should” sound by using mere jargon, highfalutin words, padded prose, or excessive passive voice. Note: specialized terms, such as ideograph, source domain, and the like are not mere jargon.
* Write from the stance that you are pointing out something interesting and non-obvious to an equal. Sound like a person trying to communicate about something interesting, not like an SAT prep book or thesaurus. Don't worry; we will work on sentence craft and elegance in this class.

### Effectiveness is Not Enough

* Remember that whether a particular rhetorical effort was “effective” is a slippery notion.
* Sometimes—heck, much of the time--rhetorical efforts fail for one or more audiences. Sometimes, the time was just not right. The more intractable the social problem, the more that immediate success becomes a weak standard for analytical insight.&#x20;
* Also, just because a rhetorical effort succeeded doesn’t necessarily sanctify or justify it—see propaganda, demagoguery, sales pitches, and mere repetition of talking points. Those “succeed” all the time, but what does that show us? “Should” they succeed?

### Ground Your Argument in Particular Concepts and Evidence

* You need to find and develop an argument grounded in the particular rhetorical concepts germane to each particular essay. If, for example, you are doing metaphor criticism, pay attention to the enabling assumptions and specific key terms of metaphor criticism. Ask: what is this way of examining rhetoric supposed to illuminate? What does it illuminate, when applied to this particular artifact?  Also, make sure that your artifact is one in which the metaphors hang together in some way that you want to make an argument about.&#x20;
* Those same considerations hold for all of your work in this course. The analytical tools and the artifact have to be a "good fit." One way to develop an argument grounded in evidence from the artifact is to make a three-column list.

1. In the first column, write down whatever specific evidence from the primary artifact you want to point out--one entry per individual item of evidence.
2. In the second column, write a specific concept from the assigned readings that can help you illuminate why that individual bit of evidence is important.
3. In the last column, write down why pointing out that bit of evidence is necessary and important. Start by generating long columns--lots of specific evidence, with concepts and statements about significance, one by one. Then, see which of the items on your long columns could be combined into an argument that might be significant and which (even if interesting) are not truly germane to that argument. Observe first, then select, then begin to build the argument.

Develop a lot of ideas, then select the best ones, the ones that interest you and that you think are the most important for readers (or viewers) to know. To select the best ideas, you have a lot of ideas to work with.
