1102
Generating Inquiry
Students will be able to generate and explore genuine lines of inquiry related to writing, language, literacy, and/or rhetoric.
Project 2: Rhetorical Analysis Final Draft
For Project 2 in this course, which is a Gordan Rule assignment, I was directed to perform a rhetorical analysis on two artifacts that were centered around the topic that I focused on for my Project 1 research assignment. As a pre-law student, my focus on both projects was on the barriers that pre-law students face on their journey to achieving a legal education with a specific emphasis on financial barriers that students face. Due to this, the two artifacts that I analyzed for this project focused on how to finance law school and handle law school debt. This assignment fulfills the outcome of exploring and generating inquiry related to writing, language, and rhetoric by allowing me to perform research on my two chosen artifacts and analyze how their different rhetorical approaches worked to achieve the same outcome. In the assignment, I concluded that “Although the two analyzed artifacts differ in rhetorical strategy,
they share a common goal of equipping prelaw students with valuable knowledge concerning their financial journey as they pursue legal education” (Leonard 5). Moving forward in my career, I will now be able to identify and utilize different methods of rhetoric to enhance the way my writing is absorbed by an audience. I was able to reflect on my writing process during this assignment as I revised and edited my conference draft. Taking the advice given to me by my peer reviewer, I was able to tweak parts of my writing to make it more digestible to my audience; my final draft is the result of these revisions.
Reading Response: Understanding Genre
For my first Reading Response assignment about understanding genre, I was directed to analyze the given materials and respond to a prompt regarding my understanding of genre. As a pre-law student, I directed my focus on the writing genre of historical legal documents, with specificity on The Federalist Papers written by the American Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. I performed a moves analysis on these documents and found that “By analyzing the structure and language of the Federalist Papers, one can get insights on the political community's emphasis on the strategic use of rhetoric to influence public opinion” (Leonard 2). These analyses and subsequent findings fit the criteria for exploring lines of inquiry related to writing, literacy, and rhetoric
by prompting me to inquire about how the genre of legal historical documents utilizes rhetoric to achieve the purpose of influencing opinion for the legal community. This assignment allowed me to discover how genres of different communities can use rhetoric to achieve certain goals. This assignment was impactful to me as it showed me how the legal community uses rhetoric to spread certain messages; therefore, I will be able to use this type of rhetoric in my legal career to achieve my own goals in the future. Throughout the completion of this assignment, I performed reflection on my writing in comparison to the writing that I was prompted to read throughout the assignment, such as some excerpts of The Federalist Papers; this allowed me to understand how I can edit my writing to have similar rhetoric as the legal document genre I analyzed in this assignment.