Rhetorical Analysis Activity

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Assignment by Brendan Hawkins, Bedford New Scholar 2021

I wanted to share this activity because I thought it went pretty well. We accomplished a lot, both in terms of discussion and in terms of having students write collaboratively throughout the class period. I’ve also received positive feedback from students on the structuring of lesson plans and hosting them in an editable Google Document. They appreciate breakout opportunities and the explicit, written instructions; and I value the options to see and discuss their low-stakes, collaborative writing on the fly. Some important context for this activity is:

• Course context. I used the following lesson plan in an online first-year writing course focused on building critical genre awareness. Specifically, we returned to the concepts of rhetoric, purpose, and audience throughout the semester. This lesson plan was used in a two-day-a-week course that spanned about 75 minutes.
• Homework. Students had previously read articles from Writing Spaces on rhetorical analysis and genre. They found Carroll’s “Backpacks vs. Briefcases” useful, but it emphasized visual analysis. We spent several class periods working from visual analysis—of genres like ads—to more verbally packed genres like the speech in the activity below. The night before this class, students were to watch the speech we were going to analyze, Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech against anti-AAPI hate crimes (in Atlanta, specifically) and a handout on rhetorical analysis by Appalachian State University’s Writing Center.
• Goals. My goals for the day were to help us better understand rhetorical concepts and see how they function within a sample text. This can function as a foundation for later moving to genre analysis, which requires understanding how these rhetorical concepts play out in texts before making comparisons across genres.

Lesson Overview

Today’s class is guided by needs I noticed in our discussions over the past week. One of the chief difficulties was delving into the text of the speech. As one of our past readings, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases,” suggested, visual analyses are likely easier/quicker for us; so we need more practice to become as fluent in analyzing text, specifically Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent speech from Atlanta, Georgia.

Part 1

We will re-watch Vice President Harris’s speech. Her speech occurs before President Biden’s and runs from the start of the video to 4:30. The transcript is included below the video, and I've copied it down for part 3 for today.

Part 2

For our first activity, I’ll put you all into three Breakout Rooms to unpack some of our most common rhetorical terms. I want you to first define your terms (each group has two), then your group will offer an explanation of how we can look for this term, and, lastly, you will look for instances of your terms in Harris’s speech.

Group	1. How do we define this term (our reading homework ight help)?	2. How do we find, examine, and/or analyze that term?	3. Where and how does this term appear and function in VP Harris's spech?
Breakout Room #1	Audience: Author/rhetor ethos: Ethos of the topic/subject in question (Who is America?):
Breakout Room #2	Exigence?
Breakout Room #3	Logos: Pathos:
	Purpose:

Part 3

More analysis but with a twist! Let’s work on some of the suggestions posed in the reading homework. I’ve posted the transcript to VP Harris’s speech below. I’ve (arbitrarily) sectioned it off so we can work on identifying where we are summarizing and where we are analyzing, specifically analyzing the rhetoric. I’ll divide you all into four Breakout Rooms to address the prompts in the following grid:

Transcript sections	1. Summarize this area of the speech. Try using language like “describes,” “says,” or “notes.”	2. Revise your summary into an analytical statement (what this means) about the rhetoric in this area of the text.
About 100 million checks are on their way, about 100 million vaccines have now been administered. Big news. Good news, and we planned to come down here to [Atlanta] Georgia to the place that made it possible to share that information. And then Tuesday night, we learned that eight of our neighbors were killed in a heinous act of violence, violence that has no place in the State of Georgia or in the United States of America. [Breakout Room #1.]
We were reminded yet again that the crises we face are many, that the foes we face are many, as the President and I discussed with our AAPI community in a meeting earlier today, whatever the killer’s motives, these facts are clear: six out of the eight people killed on Tuesday night were of Asian descent, seven were women, the shootings took place in businesses owned by Asian-Americans. The shootings took place as violent hate crimes and discrimination against Asian-Americans has risen dramatically over the last year and more. In fact, over the past year 3,800 such incidents have been reported--⅔ by women--everything from physical assault to verbal accusations, and it’s all harmful. [Breakout Room #2.]
Sadly, it’s not new. Racism is real in America, and it always has been. Xenophobia is real in America, and also has been, and sexism. In the 1860s, as Chinese workers built the transcontinental railroad, there were laws on the books forbidding them from owning property. In 1940, as they defended our nation, more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced to live in internment camps, an abuse of their civil and human rights. Asian-Americans have been attacked and scapegoated. People who are perceived that are Muslims who know what it is like to live in our country from 9/11. Last year, we had people scapegoating Asian-Americans. People were spreading this kind of hate. [Breakout Room #3.]
Ultimately, this is about who we are as a nation. This is about how we treat people with dignity and respect. Everyone has the right to go to work, to go to school, to walk down the street and be safe. And also, the right to be recognized as an American, not the Other. Not as Them. But as Us. A harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us. The President and I will not be silent. We will not stand by. We will always speak out against violence, hate crimes, and discrimination wherever and whenever it occurs. [Breakout Room #4.]

Part 4

How can we implement these concepts in our writing/revising of Project 2 (rhetorical analysis), knowing that the next draft is due by Monday?

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