Task:
Here we go again...this time you can team up with a partner (as in one other carbon based life form) to break down some rhetoric from a famous film. Get started by clicking on American Rhetoric Movie Speeches or maybe some other scene from a movie/TV you can find from the intertubes. This is a first come/ first serve list for films so there can not be any redundancy in our presentations. The list begins now...tell me your selection before you get too far into the analysis. You may not use any war/coach speeches motivational...We will cover that in January. Break it down for us. Create a brief Google Slide Show that covers the following rhetorical elements.
Slide 1-Explain what we know about the speaker and their motive(s). What do they want from their audience (not us audience- the people they are speaking to)?
Slide 2-Who is the audience? What do they value? Why might they be reluctant to move upon request of speaker? or why might they be excited or intrigued?
Slide 3-Explicitly lay out the strategy of the speaker. What must they do to "unlock" the audience? Establish at least three unique strategies at play in this speech.
Slide 4 + What are the rhetorical devices in the speech? How did this device amplify the strategy?
Slide- 6? One perfect paragraph to model how you would write this in the rhetorical analysis essay. Show this to me before you finish as it must be PERFECT!
Save the presentation in Classroom in the form shared with you.
Don't worry about the sample being too short. You are just walking us through an analysis at the start of the period. This will sharpen the blade of analysis.
Check out this project from 2014/2015 AP Star Cam Z
So Professor McGonigal needs to reach this audience using a unique set of appeals.
Let's find them!
HW:
Write a rhetorical analysis of two techniques Jane McGonigal uses during her Ted talk. I want you to move away from blanket statements of rhetoric like, "McGonigal delivers plenty of logos to persuade her audience." It is more concise to use expressions similar to the following:
For ethos= McGonigal established her authority by repeatedly...
For pathos= McGonigal appealed to the audience's sense of...
For logos= such data reinforces the belief that...
Handy outline for writing RA-
A) Establish audience
B) Explain what speaker/writer must do to reach audience
C)Reveal evidence
D) Discuss the intended/likely effect of technique
For Tuesday-
HW: Write a rhetorical analysis paragraph from Downe's letter. Look over your annotation notes and start with this outline:
Strategy #1- How does Downe “build a bridge” to his wife?
A) What does Downe do to reach out to his wife?
B) Rhetorical strategy #1- Textual evidence/ (Rhetorical Device-if there- comment on its function to amplify the strategy)?
C) Why would this effectively persuade her?
I know this is an old review of The Happening from several years back, but it is dripping with sarcasm. Here are some of my favorite zingers by Christopher Orr:
M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Happening, is not merely bad. It is an astonishment, so idiotic in conception and inept in execution that, after seeing it, one almost wonders whether it was real or imagined. It’s the kind of movie you want to laugh about with friends, swapping favorite moments of inanity: “Do you remember the part when Mark Wahlberg … ?” “God, yes. And what about that scene where the wind … ?”
The single most absurd element of The Happening, the wellspring from which all other absurdities flow, is its conceit: Across the Northeastern United States, people are succumbing to a toxic airborne agent that makes them commit suicide, often gruesomely. At first it hits major population centers, followed by smaller towns, and on down to groups of even just a handful of people. Initially, it’s assumed to be some kind of terrorist attack. But as we learn pretty early in the film, it’s not. It’s trees. Yes, the trees (and perhaps some bushes and grass, too, the movie’s never too clear on this point) have tired of humankind’s ecological despoilment and are emitting a complicated aerial neurotoxin that makes us kill ourselves en masse. I bet you wish you were the one who came up with this blockbuster idea.
But enough about the boring interpersonal melodrama: On to the boring arboreal genocide! Each time the airborne toxin strikes, everyone ceases what they were doing and freezes in their tracks for a moment. It took several such episodes before I stopped anticipating that they’d commence tapping their feet in unison, as in the beginning of a big musical ensemble number.
Alas, there’s no singing. But the methods of suicide chosen often seem chosen for their entertainment value, in particular: the man who meticulously starts an industrial mower and then lies down in front of it; the woman who wanders around a house methodically smashing her head through windows until she embeds enough glass in her skull to keel over; and, of course, the zoo lion keeper who invites his charges to bite off his arms so he can stand around, Black Knight–like, spraying blood from the stumps.
Equally odd is their insistence, even though they’ve known from the beginning that the deadly nerve agent is airborne, on spending as much time as possible outdoors. When fleeing by car, they leave the windows rolled down; anytime they want to look at a map or discuss what to do next they get out of the car to do so. It never seems to occur to any of the protagonists that they should get inside somewhere and tape the windows and doors --even though this is the only strategy we’ve seen work for anyone else. Eighty minutes into a 90-minute movie, Alma and Jess are still sitting in a small guest house with all the doors and windows open. When Elliot, who’s just watched someone fall victim to the toxin nearby screams, “Close the windows and the doors!” Alma innocently inquires “Why?”
For Monday: Rhetorical Analysis paragraphs
Prompt: In the summer of 2015, American dentist Walter J. Palmer traveled to Zimbabwe to hunt big game animals. During one excursion, Palmer shot and killed a lion named "Cecil", a well loved lion from a game reserve. The circumstance surrounding how "Cecil" died has enraged animal lovers throughout the world; however, Palmer claimed to hunt the lion lawfully under the supervision of his trackers. The subsequent outrage against Palmer has jeopardized his dental practice in Minnesota. Read the following letter Palmer wrote to his clients and community. Then write two rhetorical analysis paragraphs in which you describe the techniques Palmer uses to win back the trust of his clients. Use the following prompts to help guide your unpacking of the strategies.
A) Establish a concern that Palmer must confront about his audience
B) How does Palmer attempt to build a bridge to this audience?
C) Provide textual evidence
D) Explain why this would work on this particular audience.
In “The Visit,” an amusingly grim fairy tale, floorboards creak, doors squeak and lights lower and sometimes shriek to black. The story, a “Hansel and Gretel” redo for Generation Selfie(appositive + cultural ethos), has the virtue of simplicity and familiarity: A young brother and sister travel into the deep, dark woods, but where they once innocently held hands, they’re now holding camcorders to record an adventure quickened by anxious laughs, yelps and screams and one shivery long knife. These children don’t need someone else to immortalize their once-upon-a-time; they just point and shoot.
The director M. Night Shyamalan has a fine eye and a nice, natural way with actors, and he has a talent for gently rap-rap-rapping on your nerves. At his best, he skillfully taps the kinds of primitive fears that fuel scary campfire stories and horror flicks; at his worst (comparative conjunction), he tries too hard to be an auteur instead of just good, letting his overwrought stories and self-consciousness get in the way of his technique. After straining at originality for too long,(prepositional) he has gone back to basics in “The Visit,” with a stripped-down story and scale, a largely unknown (excellent) cast and one of those classically tinged tales of child peril that have reliably spooked audiences for generations.
This Hansel and Gretel come equipped not only with his-and-her cameras but also a Spielbergian(allusion modifier) family dynamic, featuring a loving if somewhat distracted single mother (Kathryn Hahn) and an absent father.(participial) One of those well-meaning women whose desires unwittingly unleash a world of chaos, Mom (as she’s credited) opens the movie with some yammering, squirming like a witness for the prosecution in front of a camera operated by her off-screen daughter, Becca (an appealing Olivia DeJonge).(double appositive-she just did that!) Becca and her younger brother, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould, a charmingly exuberant scene-stealer), are to stay with their maternal grandparents while Mom and her boyfriend go on a cruise, and Becca has decided to make a documentary about the trip, the first of many references to moviemaking.
Decide what you are going to review. Again, it must be some form of media-sorry- No review of Trump's coiffure...Film, Album, Tech, Show, Book, Food, Video Game, etc. Check with me before you run too far with it.
Interact with the selection...multiple times. Think about the various components that are worthy of review/critique. What this writing will not slide into is a plot summary. Take notes and begin to assemble categories of possible observations. I can help with this. You keen eye will reveal that your observations are not superficial. Your ethos will be evident.
