Essay #4, Analysis of an Argumentative Text
Length:a minimum of 6 full pages
Due Dates:
· Preliminary Notes for Rough Draft dueon Wednesday, November 20
· Rough Draft due on Monday, December 2
· Final Draft due on Wednesday, December 4; bring one hard copy to class, along with your peer-reviewed rough draft
The Assignment: For your fourth essay, you will be analyzing a pair of political campaign films. You must choose any two of the following political ads or campaign films to analyze (see Canvas for links to each video):
· Kennedy, “Kennedy with Harry Belafonte” (1960)
· Goldwater, “Immorality Ad” (1964)
· Johnson, “Daisy Ad” (1964)
· Nixon, “Vietnam” (1968)
· Clinton, The Man from Hope (1992)
· G.W. Bush, The Sky’s the Limit (2000)
· McCain, “Man in the Arena” (2008)
· Obama, Hope (2008)
· Romney, When Mitt Romney Came to Town (2012)
· Obama, The Road We’ve Traveled (2012)
It’s important to remember that an argument includes adoptedstrategies of persuasion in the process of “truth”-telling. Your primary task will be to identify the argument presented in each ad/campaign film; to in turn determine if the argument is or is not persuasive. In your analysis of persuasion in the argument, you are expected to focus on rhetorical concepts and situations (ethos, pathos, logos, kairos, voice, tone, and target audience, among others). By no means are you expected to cover every relevant concept or situation, but you should settle on which ones most significantly serve your analysis of the material.
Advice on Approaching the Assignment:
Choose ads/campaign films that interest you the most. Consider not only the candidate and time period unique to the material, but also think about how the pair of ads/films interact with one another. Seek some kind of commonality between the two.
For example, an obvious pairing would be to look at the Goldwater and Johnson material because they were produced during the same presidential race. But you also may find a different set of rewards in comparing the use of logos in Goldwater’s “Immorality Ad” with George W. Bush’s The Sky’s the Limit. Perhaps one uses logos more effectively than the other and this impacts the overall persuasive appeal of the material. There are many possible combinations which will lead to different kinds of rewards, and I encourage you not to feel limited by the date of publication.
Detailed note-taking is especially important in the prewriting stage. You will not have a written script to rely upon, so you will have to write down the most important facets of the argument presented. As we proceed through the fourth unit of the course, we will discuss note-taking strategies and practice along the way.
Advice on Structure:
Your essay should be divided into three separate sections, each of which should be distinguished by a Roman numeral.
In sections one and two, you should focus on your chosen ads/campaign films independently of one another; section three will be the space within which you discuss how the ads compare/contrast. Please include a title for each section. See the following example (these are only generic titles; feel free to choose your own):
I. Goldwater, “Immorality Ad” (1964)
II. Johnson, “Daisy Ad” (1964)
III. Comparing and Contrasting the Ads: Why Johnson’s is More Persuasive
In sections one and two you should identify the argument(s) presented in each ad/film and analyze their persuasive effect upon the viewer. In section three I’d like you to determine which ad/film is more persuasive and explain why.
Formatting:
Your essay should always adhere to MLA standards. You should use size 12 pt. Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins all around.Please avoid first or second-person pronouns in this essay.
In the upper left-hand corner of page 1, you should have your full name, the course number, the professor’s name, and the due date of the assignment (see below).
In the upper right-hand corner of each page, you should have your last name and the page number in the header. To create a header in Microsoft Word, do the following: choose the “Insert” Tab at the top of the page; choose “Page Number”à “Top of Page”à “Plain Number 3”; be sure to type your last name. Once you do this, the page numbers will automatically update for each successive page.
Below that information, you should have your title. The title should be centered, and should use capitalization in the format recommended by MLA.
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