To help prepare us for writing the “Rhetorical Review,” you will complete a series of 3 mini-reviews. Specific instructions will be provided for each mini-review, but essentially, you will explain in detail the main ideas of the text and evaluate the strategies the writer/speaker uses to communicate their message. As discussed on the “Rhetorical Review” assignment sheet, a review is more than a summary of the content; it’s also a critical analysis of the text and your reactions to it. Therefore, the mini-reviews should include both summary and evaluation. You should consider not just what it says, but also how it says it.

In addition, each mini-review should be 300-400 words. This is not a lot of space to summarize and evaluate, but that is the point. The mini-reviews will force you to be concise and specific with your words so that by the time you begin writing your “Rhetorical Review,” your ideas will be edited, exact, and refined.

Step 1:

For this discussion, you will choose one text from your text set. Write a summary of the main ideas of the text, including the specific intended audience this text addresses. This is where you discuss what the text says. Then, move on to a discussion of how the text says it. You can choose to discuss any aspect of the text, as long as you can provide specific examples from the text to support your points. Aspects you might discuss include organization, vocabulary, sources referenced (type and/or frequency), use of visuals, anecdotes, etc. (Please watch the Rhetorical Choices video: Rhetorical Choices.) Since you only have 300-400 words, you should focus specifically on the aspect(s) of the text that seem the most significant to how effectively the text communicates its message to its intended audience.

Step 2:

After you have posted, you should read over other students’ responses and comment on 2 other posts. You can comment on any person’s post, not just someone who is responding to the same text as you. Please comment by:

• Finding someone who brings up something in their evaluation that you did not discuss in your own and commenting on what you find interesting and/or surprising about their post.
• Finding someone who brings up something in their evaluation that you did discuss in yours and commenting on whether your evaluations were similar or different from one another. (For example, you and your peer might have both addressed the organization of a text; however, this does not mean that you came to the same conclusions about the organization.) What are the specific similarities and/or differences between your discussions?

Your response should indicate that you read their post and have thought carefully about your responses to their ideas/experiences. Your response to each student post should be around 100 words long.