Analysis Exercises #1 (required) and #2 (optional / extra credit)English 1A
Dr. Leiby Fall 2010
Name_Isaiah Rochlen________________________________________Section # 6338_________
You will be assigned an essay from The Mercury Reader to analyze for a number of rhetorical strategies utilized by the author. First review the material in your textbooks and in the Logic and Argumentation handout. Before completing the exercise, read the essay several times, annotating it (underlining passages, writing in the margins, etc.), especially whenever you believe you have identified the rhetorical strategies, then fill in the information below. You may use pen on this assignment sheet or (preferred method) upload the Word document from the class website, typing in the information, saving it onto a flash drive (bring the flash drive to class!) and printing a copy to submit to the instructor. Analysis #1 Due: September 27 Analysis #2 Due: October 1
Author and Title of Essay: In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, Alice Walker
Purpose: To shed light on the intense creativity and spirituality of black women during impossible times.
Audience: (primary and secondary) Primary audience: Black females who are descendants of slaves.
Secondary Audience: Anyone with an appreciation for humanity
Claim: (You may paraphraseuse your own wordsor quote the authors; however, you probably will NOT be able to find a thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph.)
If we could locate this anonymous black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers-an artist who left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use.
Methods of Development: (for example, narration, description, comparison/contrast, examples, definition, etc.; identify the methods and include the page numbers where the methods are used)
Narration (159), Description (153-162),
Point of View: (can varyfirst person, second person, third person)
Third Person
Tone: (can varysarcastic, humorous, angry, prideful, etc.; include page numbers when identifying various tones) Hopeless (155) Praiseful (154) Prideful (161) Honorable (159-160)
EXAMPLES OF ETHOS, LOGOS, AND PATHOS: (include quotations/paraphrases and page numbers; for extensive passages, quote part of the passage, use ellipses, then include last words)
Ethos:
1) In the late 1920s, my mother ran away from home to marry my father. (159)
2) There was never a moment for her to sit down, undistrubed, to unravel her own piravate thoughts; never a time free from interruption by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children (159)
3) And I remember people coming to my mothers yard to be given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden. (161)
Logos:
1) . . . in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., there hangs a quilt unlike any other in the world . . . It is considered rare, beyond price. (159)
2) Suffering from malnutrition and neglect and who knows what mental agonies, Phyllis Wheatley died. (157)
3) Virginia Woolf, in her book A Room of Ones Own, wrote that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things, certainly: a room of her own (with lock and key), and enough money to support herself (156)
Pathos:
1) Black women are called, in the folklore that so aptly identifies ones status in society, the mule of the world, because we have been handed the burdens that everyone else . . . refused to cary(158)
2) We have also been called Matriarchs, Superwomen, Mean and Evil Biches. Not to mention Castrators. (158)
3) When the poet Jean Toomer walked throught the South in the early twenties, he discovered a curious thing; black women whose spirituality was so intense, so deep, so unconcious, that they were themselves unaware of the richness they held. They stumbled blindly through their lives; creatures so abused and mutliated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves unworthy even of hope. (154)