Rhetorical Comparison

This is the first assignment in a series constructed to prepare you for the rigors of academic argument, especially in research and writing. Thus, I encourage you to choose a topic that aligns with something that holds your interest and that you could use or adapt for your researched argument.[1]

In this paper, you will find a popular source and a scholarly source that address similar issues or questions and compare the strategies of their language and construction to explain each piece’s rhetorical situation, and to extrapolate the major differences in rhetorical strategies between scholarly and popular pieces.

• Rhetor: what is their purpose or goal? What is their argument or message? What is their point of view?
• Audience: who is this written for?
• Exigence: what conversation does this piece enter? To what “moment” or situation does the piece respond?
• Constraints: how do the expectations around genre, format, language, and style impact each piece?

Guidelines for choosing your scholarly piece:

• It must be an article in a journal that conducts peer review or a chapter in an academic book by a university press or other academic press
• It cannot be a book review.

Guidelines for choosing your popular piece:

• It may appear in a newspaper, a magazine, or on a website run by an organization.
• Blog posts are not allowed.
• Reference sources like Wikipedia or Britannica are not allowed. Your piece needs to make some kind of argument.
• It must be lengthy enough to make an argument and provide some rationale and evidence to support that argument.

Each writer is required to meet with me early in the process to earn approval of the two sources they have chosen. If I do not approve one or both or your sources, you will need to find replacements and meet with me again.

Technical Requirements

• 1,000 words minimum
• MLA (default), APA, or Chicago format, depending on topic
• All drafts must be submitted to Canvas as a doc or docx

Schedule of Dates

• Conversation for sources approval: Between Jan 25 and Jan 30; sign-up will be available via the Canvas calendar          
• Early draft (800 words minimum): Fri., Feb. 2, 9:00
• Revised draft (1,000 words minimum): before your one-on-one conference
• Final draft (1,000 words minimum): Sun., Feb. 18, 23:59

Value

This assignment is worth 250 points (25% of your semester grade).

This assignment address all of the learning outcomes of the first-year composition sequence, located on our syllabus.

If you choose a VMI-specific research question:

1. Remember that more than likely, there will not be scholarly articles about VMI.
2. For example, if you choose to examine the lack of sleep for cadets, you will record VMI's daily schedules and calendars. You may interview other cadets. For the "global" picture, you will research sleep deprivation in students or in the military - in general for scholarly information.
3. Below, we list a few information resources to document VMI policies and procedures.
4. The local Newspaper, The Gazette, does report on VMI - on occasion.
   1. To access The Gazette, go to our Access World News database > select the Gazette from the main page (blue buttons options at the bottom of the page).