8. Resources to Get Started

The opportunity to do rhetorical analysis presents the analyst with two initial challenges: 1) Where to Look The analyst knows that their choice of artifact for each assignment is pretty open and that they will get a lot more out of the experience if they choose an artifact that interests them, but doesn’t yet know where to look for possible material. 2) Will it “Work”? The analyst is excited about analyzing a particular artifact but doesn’t yet know whether that artifact will “work” with the particular focus of the assignment.

Where to Look: All Around You

• Some of the strongest submissions grow out of students’ interest in working with an artifact that they encountered outside of this class. For example, a student might have learned about a particular historical or cultural event in the present or in the past; received an artifact as part of its intended audience (or maybe not its intended audience …); saw, heard, or read something on their own; encountered the artifact in an internship or on the job, etc.

• We are all awash in people’s efforts to use words, images, sound, video, etc. to shape audiences’ points of view. Rhetoric is everywhere, so be open to seeing everything around you for what might be interesting and worthwhile to examine.

• Primary rhetorical artifacts can be found anywhere—indeed, you create and consume them all the time. Anytime someone attempts to design communication to an audience for a purpose, a primary rhetorical artifact might persist as the evidence of that rhetor’s efforts in context.

In this course, you are free to choose any primary rhetorical artifact that you are interested in analyzing, so long as it is by and about real (not fictional) people and situations. Analyzing fiction—books, stories, movies, poems, etc.—is an outstanding way to develop as a thinker and writer, but there are plenty of other courses at the university that focus on those kinds of artifacts.

• Your primary artifacts can be from any era, in any medium (digital or not), so long as readers can experience them, e.g., with an appendix to your paper or by a link; can be in other languages, so long as you can supply English translations.

• They don’t have to be primarily textual, though they could be.

• They don’t have to be obviously “rhetorical,” as with a political speech.

• They don’t have to be drawn exclusively from some imagined list of Rhetorical Efforts by Powerful People on 50 Momentous Occasions That Shaped the World.

In addition to paying attention to your interests, the focus on each particular rhetorical theory we will use, and becoming aware of all of the many messages that come your way every day, 🔗 this Google Doc contains links that might be promising as you search for primary rhetorical artifacts. The document has been compiled over many years in this course.

• You should take some time right now to explore those links and see what’s compiled there–the resources compiled there might interest you or lead you to other items that interest you. You should also let me know about items you’d like to see linked on that compilation. I, and future students, will thank you.

• For example, did you know that you can see what a website looked like ten years ago or examine films shown to teenagers in the 1950s about all sorts of cultural norms, or have video and textual access to thousands of speeches, all for free? Those are just a few examples.

Will the Artifact “Work”?

• You should always choose the “best” artifact for your projects, which necessarily means that you’ve examined many possibilities and participated in class processes to help you focus your interests.

• To choose the best artifact, you need to say “no” to many “good” possibilities that are not quite as good as the best one is. An artifact might work for a particular project if its form, genre, context, purposes, and audiences give you enough meaningful, non-obvious points to argue about how it is working to shape a particular point of view.

• Each project will ask you to focus on certain rhetorical concepts and ask particular kinds of questions. When you focus on those concepts and ask those particular questions, what do you see in a specific artifact that might need an argument to point out?

• Don’t worry—we will have a lot of class processes devoted to helping you choose artifacts and come up with ideas. I love to help students develop their interests and ideas. For now, just open your eyes to what’s around you, know that you aren’t starting from scratch and that you’ll be supported in shaping your interests and ideas. As always, please feel free to ask me any questions you have. Asking questions and seeking help are keys to success and growth.

Establishing Backgrounds and Contexts

• Each assignment in this class asks you to establish the artifact’s backgrounds and contexts. After all, individuals, groups, and institutions (rhetors) use rhetoric. There’s no rhetoric without particular rhetors and thus no rhetoric free of backgrounds or contexts. Each text, video, speech, etc. that you read, write, or view involves particular rhetors situated in particular times, places, cultures, and traditions.

• Thus, to analyze a particular rhetorical artifact well, you need to establish the artifact’s backgrounds and contexts. Of course, whenever you borrow from a source, you’ll need to integrate that source into your own writing and cite the source to acknowledge that you borrowed from it.

• The kinds of sources that establish your artifact’s backgrounds and contexts vary with the artifact. 🔗 This Google Doc points you to resources where you can search for newspaper and magazine articles and other items that can help you to establish context.

• Finally, a word about Wikipedia. Some people bash Wikipedia because anyone can edit it, but of course that also means that bad edits can get reworked quickly, too. One of the best uses of Wikipedia is what any encyclopedia is useful for: “presearch.”

• The purpose of any encyclopedia is to give readers an overview of the basics and point them to places where they can dig deeper. One of the advantages of Wikipedia over traditional encyclopedias is this: a well-written Wikipedia article (not all are well-written) will cite a source for each factual assertion. Citations are in linked footnotes and a reference list, which then allows a reader to backtrack to more in-depth sources.

• So it might be useful to read a Wikipedia article for context, then backtrack to its sources (and sources cited in those sources) to dig deeper and have material to cite. The rule with Wikipedia is simple: it might be a useful place to start, never a place to stop.