The Rhetorical Device/Concept Project

Here are instructions students received…

Purpose: This project is designed to help you apply rhetorical concepts and critical strategies to specific popular contemporary texts.

Description: Compose a project in which you examine the circulation of one rhetorical device or concept in contemporary cultural texts and make important and interesting interpretive claims about the function of this device or concept in these texts. Not only will you compose an examination of this rhetorical device in popular texts, but you will also effectively argue the relevance and importance of doing so.

Form: The project’s suggested form is list article (also called a listicle), with an introductory overview/definition of the rhetorical device or concept followed by a rich and varied set of illustrative examples from popular contemporary texts and excerpts (songs, videos, ads, TV episodes, movies, novels, poems, stories, articles—anything goes), each with a thorough explanation of the device or concept’s role/function/effect in the text, along with a full MLA-style citation of the text. Links, scans, embedded videos, and/or excerpts will be necessary. In total, you’re composing 1500-2000 words for the project. You’ll divide your individual project into several separate blog entries: an overview and an entry for each illustrative example. How long is your introductory overview? How many illustrative samples will you use? How long will each of your explanations be? These questions are decided by each student.

Each blog entry will be “tagged” with at least 3 terms: the rhetorical concept (e.g., epizeuxis, overview), the medium or genre of the exemplum (e.g., song, film, novel), the effect achieved by the concept (e.g, emphasis, amplification). We’ll standardize these tags as a class so that they may function as stable, alternative navigation paths among all students’ blog entries for this class project.

Procedures:

• Choose a specific rhetorical concept or device (or very closely related set of concepts/devices) to seek out in culture, either in a certain type of text or in texts of several different kinds. Lanham’s A Handlist of Rhetorical
  Terms will be especially useful as a menu of many devices that would be
  well-suited to this project. You might additionally consult Rhetoricae Silva (http://rhetoric.byu.edu/).
• Choices will be exclusive; only one student per concept. Let’s seek to avoid redundancy and respect topical territories as we co-construct this class project. To these ends, we’ll have a clear and public proposal procedure for topic/concept choices and approval. The instructor reserves the right to veto, assign, and arbitrate topics.
• Once you find an example of your rhetorical concept at work in a articular text, you’ll write a paragraph or two that includes these components:

1. Summary of the text (no more than one sentence of plot summary allowed),
2. Description of the concept at work in the text,
3. Claim(s) about the concept’s effect(s) in the text.

• You’ll select an appropriately illustrative, brief excerpt of the text to include in your blog entry.
• We’ll use peer feedback sessions during class to help improve the quality of each other’s ideas and prose.

Evaluation: Projects will be evaluated holistically according to the course’s Unsatisfactory-Satisfactory-Excellent scheme, with Satisfactory projects demonstrating the following traits:

• Meets the project’s formal requirements;
• Demonstrates understanding of a particular and clearly defined rhetorical concept and its importance, role, functions, and effects in contemporary popular texts;
• Includes effective examination of the rhetorical concept in relevant and specific texts;
• Features college-level quality and clarity of writing and a clear logic of organization within each blog entry.

For an Excellent score on this project, a student must additionally contribute several blog entry responses (using the comments feature) to classmates’ rhetorical concepts. These additional contributions should each offer new insight into a classmate’s blog entry or propose and explain an additional illustrative example of the classmate’s rhetorical concept.